I'm one of them, the Cuban dictatorship has gotten worse over years and more brutal, the cuban government is the enemy of its own people and asphyxiates any piece of freedom we have there. Is not the U.S or any other country but pure malice of the government that do not want to give up the power and sacrifices a whole country if necessary to remain there.
The amount of ignorance (bought the dictatorship propaganda) and even malice of foreigners commenting about cuba here (because Cuba has been always the flag of the Left) is staggering.
And BTW is not the 10% only, is around the 20%, close to 2 million cuban's has left in this last 2 years. Everyone is escaping that sinking ship.
The government is fully militarized and even complaining about your kid's food can land you in jail for 10 years.
> the Cuban dictatorship has gotten worse over years and more brutal, the cuban government is the enemy of its own people and asphyxiates any piece of freedom we have there.
As someone who thinks of himself as left and is aware of the left's fondness of cuba, could you give some examples?
(specifically, things that are the result of government policies, not the embargo)
- You can get 5 years in prison just for going to the street with a sign[1]
- Cuba sends doctors to other countries, claiming to be a humanitarian nation. However, they violate the human rights of the doctors they send without any mercy [2]. Fun fact: I have a family member who worked as a Cuban doctor in Africa. Despite earning only $200 while the government kept the rest, this person decided not to return. As punishment for ending the exploitation, they were not allowed to visit their family for more than 10 years.
On July 11, 2021, people took to the streets demanding change. The result? Brutal repression.[3]
I wonder what a sensible way forward for Cubans is, and their government. What would it take for the US to lift sanctions (I assume a radical shift within Cuba's government), and for Cuba itself (as a whole) to restructure their government in a way that would benefit them and everyone.
Cuba would be a great travel destination.
Their cigars aren't as on par anymore as far as I know, but there's potential there, Nicaragua and Dominican Republic basically make the best ones last I checked.
I've been smoking cigars for the past 15 years. I was lucky enough to have smoked only cuban cigars (which are legal where I'm from), so I know them very well.
Nicaragua and Dominican Republic are garbage compared to Cubans, still to this day. Several times while in the US (where I've lived in the past few years) I tried to smoke non-cuban cigars. Not once I found something that was remotely close to the worse cuban I've had.
My basic understanding is because of two factors:
1. The tobacco doesn't grow anywhere else like it does in Cuba. It's an island with very specific combination of soil and weather that can't be replicated. The tobacco leafs are huge in Cuba and that makes a big difference when making a cigar which ideally should use as few leafs as possible.
2. The best workers that know how to select, blend and roll a cigar are still all in Cuba. Other countries tried to replicate but they don't come close in terms of skills and knowledge.
I don't have sources for the two factors above but my experience tells me it adds up.
I only heard people complimenting non-cuban cigars here in the US. Nowhere else. Which sounds fair or else the entire cigar industry would have gone bankrupt without access to the best stuff. Overtime you won't find people in the US who understands what a cuban cigar is like because they have no exposure to it.
While the tobacco itself is unbeatable, Cuban cigars have quality control issues. You regularly run into draw issues, for example. Aging is typically required for best experience, which also isn't easy.
I smoke Olivas and Arturo Fuentes regularly, despite having access to Cubans.
I agree with your statement on quality control issues. Also fake cigars are a huge problem. I've heard about many cases of cigars made in Cuba by "freelancers" and then sold in repurposed boxes and labels. Those aren't terrible cigars, but definitely not great.
I'll try those 2 you mentioned and see if it's to my taste. Dona Flor, made in Brazil, are pretty decent. Unfortunately they are not easy to come by near where I live.
Oliva Melanio Serie V comes in various sizes from robusto up, with maduro variants (I don't think Cuba does maduros). It's generally well regarded, smokeable, and I haven't seen one with significant issues. I often have non-maduro robustos in my humidor.
Arturo Fuente Hemingway Short Story is quick, and an alternative to the Trinidad Reyes in that respect. Different taste profile, of course.
In both cases — not Cubans, so no grassiness, and heavier, but not bad at all.
It's been a while since I visited places outside the US, but one of the shocking things was travel ads for Cuba everywhere.
From what I can tell, US-Cuban relations seem to be at the whim of the US President. Most of the US population doesn't care; most of the rest of the world has fine relations with Cuba, but isn't going to pressure the US. Nobody is sending missiles to Cuba anymore.
What I can't understand is WHY are the people who escaped for a better life, pro embargo... What, 70 years later? Seems like it's only being highly effective at hurting the general population
My father migrated from Cuba in the 60's and anytime I asked him whether it was worth me visiting he promptly said
"No, absolutely not. Don't even waste your time considering it. Castro ruined it and it will never be the same".
I think the moral is that for many Cubans the embargo isn't against the people, it's against the Cuban government, and they genuinely hate the government with every fiber of their existence. They hate what Castro took from them and have no dissolutions that letting up the embargo would strengthen that governments rule while only providing minuscule benefits to the people. Until the government regime changes in Cuba, any pressure we can apply is worth it.
Just to clarify, you are upholding your father's political retribution despite being born elsewhere and (presumably) never visiting? I'm genuinely curious.
It was a traumatic event in his father’s life. There is no illogic in despising the people and organizations that brought about that misery on his father.
The answer to this question is so obvious I have trouble believing you are asking in good faith.
Cuban exiles are about 50/50 on embargo. It’s been around a while, and obviously isn’t changing the regime. Making people poor doesn’t bring democracy.
Spy stations aren't at all close to the level of provocation that missile launcher would be - the former have been around for decades, the latter nearly caused WWIII about 62 years ago.
Still no. Just a visit, doesn't look like Cuba has any wish to become Russia's military fortress. From Russia side all decisions are made by a single person who is not thinking big. Cuba would be quite expensive. Ukraine is more then enough for Putin, unlikely he wants a new 'adventure'.
there is no point in comparing gdps here, what's important is what is the capability of war industry and armies are, and at the moment we can see that industries are not that far off, add nuclear weapons to the picture, and its draw, just as it was in the cold war.
The overall GDP tells you what capabilities exist in total. Life of Russians is significantly more impacted in post because they are redirecting a much larger part of their economy. Let's also not forget that the cold war was with the Soviet Union and not just Russia.
GDP is directly and strongly correlated to military industrial capability for sustaining a meaningful war effort. Modern history has shown this time and time again in many wars where enemies seriously applied themselves to pushing onward (I say this to exclude things like the Vietnam War, in which the U.S could have crushed the North but didn't have the political or social will do push it that far). Aside from its nuclear arsenal, Russia is economically and in terms of sustained war production no match for the NATO Alliance, even without the U.S. With U.S support, there's no chance. Putin himself even recently stated this, calling the idea of attacking NATO insane and specifically referencing his country's economic strength vs. that of NATO and the U.S.
Russia is just barely sustaining its war with Ukraine and the production capacity behind restocking destroyed and lost supplies. Never mind a war with NATO, unless they're willing to use nukes and risk utterly destroying themselves, and I don't quite think Putin is that insane. Even if he is, I don't think those surrounding him are, and their sycophancy would rapidly evaporate if faced with a real, immediate threat of their boss unleashing something that makes their decades of hard-stolen self-enrichment become irrelevant.
Because he's not targeting the west, he's targeting semi-literate part of Russian population. He isn't giving statements like that on CNN, he's giving statements like that on TV programs that no educated person watches.
He's there to blow things out of proportion locally, he just happens to be translated from time to time for clicks. There's no significance to his words. He doesn't speak on behalf of Putin, he's not there to leak some super-secret internal plans for the future, he's just there to yap about how Russia can totally take over the entire Europe.
education has nothing to do with this, an average university professor in Russia(or for a matter of fact in the west too) is a radical supporter of the mainstream media
This is 60 years ago... In that same timeframe the EU was formed and grown to 26 nations including roughly 10 that pointed nuclear missiles at each other one time.
Just like Cuba didn't really itself point missiles towards the US (it was the soviets), the Warsaw pact nations inside current EU were used as Soviet proxies too.
Ok, I still don't get it then. The Warsaw pact nations were not planning on using their nukes on other European nations with nuclear weapons, to avoid getting nuked themselves. This is documented in the (formerly) secret war plans that were released by the Czech republic.
Everyone in europe had to be fine with that for the whole cold war. Never understood the american hysterics during the cuban missile crisis. Like the END wasnt real before and after.Manifest destiny for exceptional Hipocrasy.
You know that this was a response for american missiles being placed on Turkey, right? By your comment, I assume that you also agree with Russia, when they criticize NATO expansion around their borders, right?
By your comment, I assume that you don't see a difference between "not having a commercial relationship with a country" and "invading and annexing a country".
Cuba was being invaded at that time (Bay of Pigs Invasion, later there was also discussion about a false flag attack to kill people, blame Cuba and then justify an invasion). From the point of view of Cuba, the Russian missiles were a way to ensure that other invasions would not happen again. If the missile crises were not solved, then the conflict would escalate to a war, but fortunately, it did not happen.
If you are arguing this is normal or in some way explainable, I don't know what to tell you. There is ample reason why relations aren't good and you cannot exclusively blame others (the US) for it.
A bunch of Floridians who are, or are descended from, folks who had their land and businesses seized during the revolution are holding grudges and won’t let go of them until they’re given their stuff back or a ton of money, which, this far on, isn’t happening.
Florida is important in Presidential elections.
US elections are structured such that dumb stuff like a relatively small—but loud—and also hopeless interest in a single US state can influence policy and make a whole bunch more lives worse for no good reason.
I think that's really underselling the political persecution that many have suffered in Cuba. It's far and away from just wanting reparations for land grabs.
We have sanctions on Cuba for the same reason we have sanctions on Russia and Venezuela now- we don't want to fund what their government is doing, and allying with them gives us little to nothing in return.
That said, it's pretty obvious that economic sanctions aren't bringing about regime change. I don't think anyone has the stomach for putting boots on the ground, though.
> allying with them gives us little to nothing in return.
Recent events have shown that to be very much not the case. Over the past few weeks we've had news of the Russian Navy paying port calls and the Chinese building major signals intelligence capabilities. Wouldn't it be better to have them as an ally?
It's always interesting to contrast our relationships with Cuba vs Vietnam. We fought a long hot war with Vietnam yet today we have good relations with them. Obviously we can't say we would have a good relationship with Cuba if we had been nicer to them but it certainly makes me think.
I strongly suspect the possibility of normalizing relations while the Castros held power would have been impossible.
I had actually expected some progress on this front after they got new blood in a few years ago, but he's much the same, and given their relations with other sanctioned countries like North Korea, and calling Israel a terrorist state, I don't really see much desire for change from either side.
> we don't want to fund what their government is doing
What is their government doing that is so terrible?
Anyway let's suppose Cuba is a brutal dictatorship, even though it really isn't by any metric. Why are there no sanctions on Saudi Arabia? Why no sanctions on Taiwan during the white terror? Why no sanctions on Chile when they threw alive protesters from flying helicopters? I could go on for a while.
My whole family was murdered by the government of Cuba because they verbally disagreed with Fidel and communism. No crimes other than speaking out were committed. That's what they're doing that is so terrible.
That's how revolutions work, if you disagree you usually get killed.
The thing is that people would get killed for disagreeing even under Batista. If your family was happy with Batista then I don't think they were in a clean line of business.
I agree, especially considering that Batista had been sold arms until 1958, when the fights with the rebels had been ongoing for a while already (1956 I believe). The result is that Batista fought the rebels using USA weapons, embargo or not.
> That said, it's pretty obvious that economic sanctions aren't bringing about regime change.
On the flip side, you have China, where US pretty much helped build up their economy and hoped for a peaceful and democratic outcome. How well did that go?
The USSR and China and prime examples of sanctioning vs opening up. One is still around and persucting its people and the other is on the dust bin of history. The problem with the Cuba sanctions is that a large chunk of countries aren't sanctioning Cuba. If everybody got behind the sanctions regime change would happen. Half assing it won't cut it.
I'd rather live in the modern day, "unequally" with the rich, than starve or die of disease equally with the rich of the middle ages.
Just because the rich have 100Xed in quality of life over the last century, doesn't negate the fact that the poor have 10Xed in quality of life.
Making everyone equal is easy. Just make them all equally dead, starving, or miserable, just like they were in past centuries."
Shows a lack of historical knowledge. If all were so miserable, how did they built the greatest civilization, Christendom? Did Newton or Leibniz starve to death? The picture you are drawing here of past centuries is ahistorical and completely disregards the unbelievable quality of art and architecture that was possible during times where people were, according to you, "dead, starving, or miserable". (As if they aren't today.)
I don't want to live at all. I would kill myself immediately did I not fear God, Christ, and eternal damnation.
The Jackson-Vanik amendment was only repealed in 2012, at the same point when the Magnitsky act was signed. I don't think Putin & co see a lifting of sanctions as a possibility, given past experience.
Ok, that doesn't change the fact that all that is happening is that they are losing more and more lives, military power, and are suffering significant economic damage.
Thats the point. They are taking nothing but losses. All for some land that is now worthless after the war.
They obviously see things differently. You cannot claim that the particular sanctions regime in place pushes Putin & co towards your desired course of action without understanding their motivations.
Oh they are absolutely have motivations against their own people dieing in the hundreds of thousands and they have motivations against them losing significant military assets and having massive amounts of economic damages.
Those are normal motivations they every county has.
That's why the best way to get them to change behavior is to "motivate" them with those consequences.
Current analysis is that Russia has maybe another year and a half left in their war before it ends due to these "motivational factors".
A few hundred Bradleys and Abrams, weapons systems that were designed to murder soviets, which we built by the thousands, in the hope that we could defend Europe from an invasion it turns out wasn't ever likely to happen.
Those machines are not fit for a war with China, which is our current fear, and have to be replaced anyway. It literally costs obscene amounts of money to scrap and disarm them, but it turns out it's very cheap to let them save a few Ukrainian lives.
Nearly every dollar "spent" for Ukraine was either spent in the 80s military build up or is loaned to Ukraine so they can purchase our stuff.
The Russia/USSR transition is more akin to that of the Roman Republic to the Principate/Dominate. Or the different stages of other closely related empires throughout history after dealing with internal regime, partial reversals and so forth.
Even Putin sees Russia/USSR as parts of a organic historic continuum, and this is a key component of his rhetoric. That the USSR's territorial losses are Russia's losses and must be reversed if Russia it to "save face" and so on.
In some aspects we could say that, given the high number of USSR tanks, ships and weapons that are being destroyed by the Ukrainian army just right now.
USSR was a necessary collaborator in this invasion.
The USSR is gone. It can't collaborate with anything. Did your great-great-great-great-great grandparents who died before the internet collbarate with you to write this post?
It may not in the short or medium term cause regime change, but sufficiently large sanctions on a country do stop it from growing in influence, wealth and power. Eventually, after some number of generations, Cuba could be so poor in comparison to the rising tide of the rest of the world, that it's not even able to defend itself or maintain government control. At some point, the disparity in power becomes overwhelming and you have super high tech society surrounding stone age cave men.
The problem is that not enough nations are participating in the sanctions. Multiple generations should have been plenty of time, especially given the harms done to the population in the interim.
Can that really happen? Won’t one of the visiting tourists bring news of the wheel or what have you eventually?
Seems more likely sanctions would cause a steady state where the sanctioned country is some n months/years behind where it would otherwise be, speaking as a complete geopolitical layman anyway.
Not OP but the problem is not awareness of modern solutions that prevents sanctioned societies from modernizing, the isolation from trade prevents local industry from growing which keeps society living at subsistence levels and when everyone is poor you don’t have a class of people with spare time or the resources necessary to build up local industry that brings about capital that brings about infrastructure modernization etc.
> We have sanctions on Cuba for the same reason we have sanctions on Russia and Venezuela
Many senior government officials over the years, including then Vice President Cheney, have plainly said that our interest in Venezuela is their oil. The sanctions, as in any country, are about wanting control over their resources.
> US elections are structured such that dumb stuff like a relatively small—but loud—and also hopeless interest
I can tell you, not just the US.
See: farmers having an absolute chokehold on the EU despite virtually everyone hating them, and them only being a tiny percentage of population, votes or GDP.
Usually problems vis-a-vis farmers come from farmers being exalted just like you're doing, so politically they've been given a lot of leeway for government subsidies and entitlements. There are many farmers who struggle making a living on limited land, even with subsidies. But in other professions, there wouldn't be those subsidies and that specific job wouldn't be economically viable. But there are also many other farmers with $10m+ properties and paying meager farmhand wages to those doing the actual work, while the farmer landowner gets the million dollar subsidies paying them to dump milk or grow wasteful corn fuel.
Essentially, it's because producing food doesn't give you the right to be pampered by everyone else and make economically bad decisions.
In Europe specifically, it would be in part because of the "tractor protests" where tractors were mass driven into city centers in protest, especially the Netherlands because they didn't like being restricted on nitrogen pollution. It would be especially irksome when you can get most peoples' votes for bad policy just by saying "support farmers, they grow your food." Except that all that nitrogen in the Netherlands goes to actually growing exported food ($$)...
Obama did start warming relations, probably due to that shift. Trump reversed it. I expect it’ll continue to, at best, see-saw until Republicans are comfortable enough with their advantage in Florida to ignore the Cuban vote.
It was reversed since it was a campaign promise. The idea was that all that money from tourism was only helping the Castro regime. A sentiment I'm sure most Cubans are not happy about.
Where does this plantation-owner story come from? How many plantation owners do you think existed?
And that still doesn't explain the continual drain happening, to this day, as is evidenced by this very article we're commenting on. What, are these 10% also filthy capitalists somehow?
As a Serb whose parents fled an eerily similar situation to Cuba's way back when for greener pastures to the literal other side of the planet, this thing where people blame the citizens rather than the worthless piece of shit government for fleeing these socialist hellholes is always an amusing one for me.
you should really read on Cuba before comparing it to Serbia. completely different situation and the people fleeting it in the last decade is exclusively about the the embargo.
> that still doesn't explain the continual drain happening, to this day,
Are we sure and can be trust that this numbers are really correct?
Alternative hypothese: Maybe a part of this people "left the country" in 2022 by covid 19 and statistics were masked to avoid public embarrassment. I would not bet against it.
Fun fact, I'm a grandchildren of poles who lived in what was polish land but given to Ukraine after WW2 when Stalin moved Ukraine westwards (and compensated Poland with former German land).
I received a compensation 60 years after WW2, but it was few thousand euros (many generations have passed). And by the way it was the polish, not Ukrainian government that compensated us.
This is foundational to American legal system in many cases. If your local cops for instance unjustly beat say Cubans and get sued for it the inhabitants will pay and possibly even their children through debt.
Well, that's how it should work. Qualified immunity massively complicates this in favor of the cop and therefore the city employing said cop and the residents of the city. It is technically not impossible to win such a case if you get a court to take it, but you might be facing some insurmountable odds getting a court to take the case.
Not true. After the Treaty of Paris (1783) was signed, trade between the US and UK resumed almost immediately; and diplomatic relations were reestablished in 1785. Shortly after the war (1793), when France and Britain went to war, rather than back up the French, the US signed the Jay Treaty to maintain trade and positive relations with the UK... angering France who helped us gain independence.
Other than the revolutionary war from 1776 to 1785, the other break we had was from 1812-1815 during the War of 1812.
Many were. My grandfather was just a doctor that owned a townhouse. My mom had her toy bear's head ripped off by customs as she was leaving to check she wasn't smuggling gold out of the country. My grandfather was completely uninvolved in the war, like the vast majority of Cubans. Castro promised everyone that Cuba would become a democracy. Stopped buying the leftist propaganda you've been fed. You have 10% of a country fleeing in 3 years and you people still can't admit you were wrong, it's worse than a cult.
The bright side is, despite the suffering involved, moving to America is the greatest thing that could have happened to my family.
Yeah, we killed the mosquitoes that don't let us sleep and gave us Dengue every month because the gov can't provide electricity and if you protest you dissapear to jail
Sorry, but that does not matter. If they did anything illegal, they should be prosecuted by and in the country it happened, but you are presuming collective guilt here. That is always, universally, the wrong thing to do.
We are talking about the descendants of the wealthy or dissident people who were escaping the Cuban revolution, where Cuba at the time was largely owned by foreign sugar plantations which was perpetuated by the the brutal military dictatorship of Batista, which was supported by the US government as well as organized crime (and where one ends and the other begins is sometimes unclear…)
The legacy of colonialism still casts a dark shadow. You can replace who rules much easier than changing how they rule. Batista a dictator replaced by Castro another dictator.
It was a better lie when "the people we robbed and killed totally deserved it" was about Kulaks. Seriously it is the same victim blaming bullshit to absolve a government of thieves.
Sometimes I want to but it's hard when every European country has tried to kill you. (Maybe there's one that was good to Jews, but I'm pretty sure there wasn't, for the simple reason that all the Jews would go there then, and the countries all the Jews went to, Spain and then Poland, then tried to kill us.) I don't want to have a grudge against a continent.
I don't think it's fair to apply that to Poland. Jews were well integrated into Polish society for most of its history during the Commonwealth era. Poland-Lithuania was a very pluralistic state with explicit protection in law for religious liberty, something that didn't exit in pretty much any other European state during the early modern era. The inquisition didn't operate there after the mid 16th century at all, just around the time when Spain was ramping it up.
Most of the examples of antisemitic repression in Poland took place during the post-partition era in the 19th century, when Poland was ruled by Russia, and Poles themselves faced similar repression by the Russian authorities.
1. Albania was part of the Ottoman Empire, which, while better than most of Europe for Jews, was not great; being "better than most of Europe" typically meant "you don't get killed every year" and still allows for significant antisemitism. I am willing to grant that they may not have wanted to be part of the Ottoman Empire, though, and there's little on antisemitic massacres. So I concede that I do not need to hold a grudge against Albania. Thank you, Albania.
2. As for Bulgaria...not deporting Jews to their death for one small period of time != lack of antisemitism in the past few hundred years.
According to the USHMM,[1] Bulgaria's actions in World War Two included:
Instituting laws that, among other things, forbid Jews from marrying non-Jews and restricted where Jews could live and what jobs they could have.
Deporting Jews who were not in Bulgaria pre-war (its borders expanded) to their deaths.
Whenever you have to ask that question, it is often a better idea to sit down with a nice cup of tea, and take some time to reconsider what the person you are replying to was intending to do with their comment.
The comment pokes fun at people holding grudges for that long, on behalf of their ancestors, and at the whole situation in general. Ultimately is is meant to make people think whether demanding reparations from a less well-off people is really a better idea than just moving on. If everyone held grudges like that, no two people on earth would have good relations and we'd all sit in our little caves brooding over some slight our neighbor's ancestors inflicted on our family ten generations ago.
No, I'm not arguing for genocide. But thanks for the laugh.
Politics. Florida used to be swing state in Presidential Elections. The Cuban community in Florida loses their shit if President talks about lifting the sanctions and will vote other way. If all Cubans had settled in California or Wyoming, we likely would have lifted sanctions a long time ago since they wouldn't have as much political power. It's why we lifted sanctions on Vietnam so long ago. Vietnamese who fled mostly immigrated to California and can't impact California voting Democrat.
There seems to be a belief that if sanctions remain THIS YEAR, regime change will come to Cuba. It didn't work. Well, NEXT YEAR they will, they have to! Repeat for 50 years.
Most people fleeing Cuba blame current regime for their suffering with good reason. So they have a desire to see it overthrown.
What does South America have to do with Cuba? And why do you assume that South America is poor? Much of South America enjoys a high standard of living, and is nowhere near as poor as most of Central America, for example, and definitely much richer than Africa.
Nobody made south America poor; like every continent poverty was the natural state. South America just did a worse job at developing the infrastructure, rule of law, institutions and culture necessary to lift itself out of poverty as fast as north America.
With the exception of Argentina, which after WW2 was one of the richest countries in the world, but through bad political choices ended up impoverishing itself.
If you have any desire to not be remarkably ignorant of 20th century history, I’d suggest spending a few minutes reading about who in North America did a bunch of coups and otherwise created the conditions for a lack of rule of law in South America.
I'm surprised at this take. It seems readily apparent that Cuban exiles want their countrymen and women to be free from state communist control and have the ability to speak their mind, practice economic freedom and their religion, which is I understand is very Catholic from Spanish influences. I don't know how you can say Cuban exiles want the people they left behind to suffer.
I am saying that because the sanctions haven't achieved anything positive for the last decades. At some point people just have to admit that they don't work but cause a lot of suffering. I bet if the US traded with Cuba, the communist regime would quickly fall apart like the Eastern block did.
A hostile regime 90 miles from US mainland will be treated differently. Cuba is not some vanilla leftist regime that has no love for America. Cuban intelligence and elite for the past 50 years have been active subverting US interests. A unilateral withdrawal of sanctions would mean rewarding bad behavior. Do not let the small size of Cuba underestimate them, they are behind all major anti-American activity in Latin America. They were are major force supporting Maduro in Venezuela.
Why does not the Communist regime in Cuba "open up"? Because they know the day Cuba becomes a multiparty state with elections -- they have to run out of the country. Both Cuban and Venezuelan elite along with many Caribbean states are active in Drug Dealings and Money Laundering.
Yes, the hawks in US have a role but they are not only active players, there are hawks in Cuba too.
The message is: if you refuse to be our puppet state and play by our rules, we will destroy you for as long as it takes.
Anyone who believes the US acts to punish evil authoritarians in defense of freedom and democracy is delusional. Look at our allies in the middle east.
Why did the US drop 2 nuclear bombs on Japan? Why the US is keeping Israel as their toy? Why the US entered the Vietnam war (hint: no, not to avoid the spread of communism). US is the bad boy of this planet, just because they can.
Japan declared war on the US. Didn't surrender when it became obvious they were going to lose and instead decided to inflict as many casualties on the as they could on the way down. So they got nuked.
> Why the US is keeping Israel as their toy?
The US inherited a lot of messes after WWII. Not really the US fault the Palestinians always make bad choices.
> Why the US entered the Vietnam war (hint: no, not to avoid the spread of communism)
Hint you are 100% self servingly wrong about that.
> US is the bad boy of this planet, just because they can
I've come to the opinion people that say this are upset that the US stands in the way of some nastiness they want to inflict on someone.
and agent orange, and destroy literally everything before we tail it back to our own country, not before we tell our vets to “suck it up” and bootstrap their PTSD due to exposure of aforementioned war crimes.
> What would it take for the US to lift sanctions (I assume a radical shift within Cuba's government), and for Cuba itself (as a whole) to restructure their government in a way that would benefit them and everyone.
It's irrelevant. Hard-line socialist countries don't voluntarily decide to change their government: their countries collapse and start over again.
While sanctions on Cuba are irrelevant to the US these days, it doesn't change the fact that Cuba would be a dysfunctional society in any case. Venezuela was a resource rich nation and 7.7 million people fled (>20% of the population). The Soviet Union was one of the most resource-rich entities in the world, with similar failures.
I find it somewhat astonishing that people in tech—an industry built around the belief that well-built systems can produce good results—are so dismissive of the role of agency when it comes to these issues. Somehow it's America's fault that people are leaving Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico... and left to their own devices, those places would be paradise.
This is true of any regime which refuses to adapt to reality. And in any case it's more or less tautological: a "hardliner" is defined precisely by the refusal to budge even when it might be to their benefit.
Obama opened up travel to Cuba. I went just months after his historic visit. There were still limitations, such as with currency, that made it a somewhat complicated travel destination. It would require more significant changes to make it a go-to vacation spot, but it's generally believed that is within presidential power.
Trump reverted the relationship back to Cold War status when he took office.
If you understand the origin of the sanctions against Cuba, you know the answer to this question is that the US wants control over Cuba and their resources.
There are many similar destinations, and all of them are still poor. Besides, Cuba has already tourists from Canada and Europe.
My guess their best chance is to start manufacturing for cheap. Close to US makes them more competitive. But for this to happen commies government has to go.
In southern europe we call this "Brain drain". It's a global phenomenon it seems, freedom of movement leads to contentration of productive forces to a few global cities, while the rest of the planet is increasingly deserted
Doesn’t brain drain imply the smarter people are moving? I’m not sure that’s what’s happening here. I think it’s anyone who can get out.
When I was in Havana our AirBnB was next to the Spanish embassy. There was a long line every morning of potential emigres waiting for their turn. (I have no idea how the process works when they get to the front of the line, I just was told they were trying to get out of the country legally. )
After spending a couple weeks in Cuba it’s not hard to see why.
The US has been the the only major country sanctioning Cuba for a decade and a half, but the economy has only gotten worse. Sanctions may explain why they has lagged behind in tech. It doesn't explain why Cuba needs to import 70-80% of their food despite being a fertile tropical paradise.
Cuba’s attitude towards US sanctions is: “bring them on!”
Even before Castro came to power, Che Guevara planned in enacting extreme tariffs to keep American money out. He used 19th century American tariffs to justify this.
Cubas government is far more interested in maintaining control than opening up to trade.
They are willing to advertise to tourists, which brings in cash without shaking things up.
But they aren’t willing to make the adaptations international trade requires.
> The US has been the the only major country sanctioning Cuba for a decade and a half
Which is enough, as the US controls the emission of dollars, have monopolies over several technologies and, as it extends the sanctions even to the ships that trade in Cuba, disallowing them to enter in US, on practice it difficult trades between Cuba and any other country.
> It doesn't explain why Cuba needs to import 70-80% of their food despite being a fertile tropical paradise.
Modern agriculture depends on machines and fertilizers. And if you go without modern technology, climate change and shortages of water can be an even greater blow to your production. You will produce food, but will be susceptible to famine crisis, as were all countries before sufficient technological development.
Moreover, Cuba is also not an agrarian country. The urban population is greater than the rural, like in any modern country. Remember that societies without much technology had to have a much greater part of population in rural areas instead of cities to be self-sufficient in food.
If they're capable of 1950s era urbanism, they're capable of 1950s era agricultural technology. They get enough dollars from tourism and exports to purchase make up for what they don't have just like any other small nation. The are perfectly capable of growing tobacco and sugar. The problem is that the profit from non-cash crops is either too low like staple carbohydrates, or too variable, like fruits and vegetables to incentive farmers in a socialist country.
I'm not educated on the subject. Why can't Cuba import the fertilizer and build the machines? There are open source blueprints, like the Global Village Construction Set.
Cuba is an island with very little natural resources. Therefore, to build almost anything, it needs to buy it from other countries. The sanctions makes everything coming from outside much more expensive. And to buy things, they need money (dollar, or some other international currency). They can get it only in the few areas where they can be internationally competitive (as any imported product is much more expensive to them, they will not be competitive in most industries): tourism, offering medical services and selling cigars.
As they have fewer baskets to place their eggs, they are much more succetible to crisis: a blow in one economical activity generates crisis that affects a lot all other areas. For example, one of the causes for the current crisis is the pandemics that dropped their tourism to zero for 2 years. Now they have much less to invest, affecting all economical activities.
Foreign currency the US is Cuba's most logical export market. So, with a shortfall of dollars/etc, importing things is problematic. So Cuba's reliance on importing food - especially from the US - looks like a spiral: eating today taking precedence over planting etc.
I don't know as much about this next part, but seeds are also harder to import. I'd hazard a guess at there not being much capacity in that market unless you're buying from Monsanto or the like, which seems not to be an option in Cuba as those (American) companies are not exempt from the embargo, unlike exporters of food and medical supplies.
The answer here is "monsanto is a de facto monopoly" - they're essentially the only company on earth that this kind of business can be done with on any kind of scale.
The US excluding otherwise Visa Waiver Program (VWP), aka ESTA, eligible citizens from using VWP if they have visited Cuba since since 2021 is probably bad news for Cuba.
Bad news for citizens of these countries that would have visited Cuba if they also want to visit USA and don’t want to bother with US visas:
In Cuba, the only wealthy people are government bureaucrats. As always, communism becomes dictatorship and the people suffer most. Top down control of economy doesn't work. I went to numerous tobacco plantations in Cuba and they told me the government takes 90% of their harvest and they're allowed to keep and sell 10%. I stayed with an OBGyn who gets paid $80 USD/month. He built his house out of cinderblocks. That's how you get rewarded for your 'free' education. Anyone glorifying communism is a fucking idiot with no life experience.
> It doesn't explain why Cuba needs to import 70-80% of their food despite being a fertile tropical paradise.
There have been famine and starvation before the communists took power. I don't think Cuba has ever been fully food self-sufficient. Not many countries are.
Not to mention agriculture needs access to fertilizers which the sanctions make harder to get.
The more important part from your source:
> The largest island in the Caribbean, Cuba is one of the most successful in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Food-based social safety nets include a monthly food basket for the entire population, school feeding programs, and mother-and-child health care programs.
This is a big achievement.
Also it doesn't make sense to compare Cuba with the richest Western Countries. Communist revolutions tend to happen in the poorest countries of the world. Saying they are poor because of communism is confusing cause and effect.
If we compare Cuba to her peers in Latin America, especially Haiti, then Cuba is doing vastly, vastly better. Cuba is doing really well on the human development index, providing free health care and decent education for all.
>If we compare Cuba to her peers in Latin America, especially Haiti...
Haiti has a complicating factor. After winning independence from France, France told Haiti to pay 'debt' back to France. In the end, it had to pay 112 million Francs, which is an amazing sum for a newly independent country, and I think that it's unique in history, a government demanding that exorbitant of a payment from a newly independent country. It took until 1947 for Haiti to finish paying, 122 years of payment. You can't get over that sort of thing easily.
That said, Cuba's life expectancy (Cuban GDP per capita: $7,486 or so, as of 2021) is equal to or greater than much wealthier countries, like Lithuania ($30,577), Oman ($46,574), Seychelles ($30,126), or Russia ($26,120). In 2020, its life expectancy surpassed the US! Cuba has consistently outperformed countries like Lithuania, Russia, and even the world in life expectancy (counting since 2000), all of which have much greater GDP per capita. See https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-gdp-pe....
It wasn't the independence debt. Haiti was a poor country in the 40s and 50s but not exceptionally poor compared to other peer countries. What set Haiti up to be the basket case it is today was the decades of corruption and malgovernment that occurred under the dictatorial rule of the Duvalier family.
what food basket are you talking about? that thing only exists in the news. in reality why dystopian reality you live in?
Cuba better than Haiti??? You are reading to many fake news.
Cubans are travelling to Haiti to buy food and medicine.
Cuban healthcare good? You are joking right? If you need surgery have to bring your own equipment, including chirurgical globes and syringes. You have to either buy it in the black market or have a relative in a capitalist country to send it to you.
Dont even get me started on education.
Happy to provide you more details and break the bubble you are leaving in.
I have lived in Cuba for one and a half years and have studied there. The education system is in same aspects superior than the one in my home country, Germany.
I have visited schools and the education level of the vastly higher. The knowledge of the children greatly impressed me. In fact you could talk the average person on the street about complicated issues regarding history, philosophy and economy. Many where even multi-lingual.
It is true that Cuba has trouble getting some medical equipment due to the sanctions but she also has a for a small island impressive pharmaceutical industry. There is a great medication for diabetics that would save many lives if it were allowed to be exported in the US. Not to mention having developed their own covid vaccine.
I was able to travel the whole country freely. I didn't stay in some touristy hotel, I lived among Cubans. There is literally no way my experience could have been controlled by the state.
People were not afraid to talk critically about their government with me and did so often.
People are starving, leaving the country in millions, but you are still adamant they are delusional and live in a bubble. Maybe, just maybe you haven't saw and understood everything while visiting?
> On September 8, 2006, the Miami Herald's president Jesús Díaz Jr. fired three journalists because they had allegedly been paid by the United States government to work for anti-Cuba propaganda TV and radio channels.
> Less than a month later, responding to pressure from the Cuban community in Miami, Díaz resigned after reinstating the fired journalists, saying that "policies prohibiting such behavior were ambiguously communicated, inconsistently applied and widely misunderstood over many years".
I used to have more sympathy for this position, and my political biases are strongly left wing, but having spent time in Cuba on and off for the last 20 years... time has shown just how incompetent and malevolent the Cuban regime is.
It would suck badly there without the sanctions, too.
Though I think the sanctions give the regime an excuse. Obama was right to start to lift restrictions... a decade of continued stagnation even after the sanctions lifted would have undermined the regime's ability to continue to rule more than anything else.
Would it have really? I'm not particularly up to speed on the situation in Cuba, but there are a lot of awful regimes on this planet that remain in power simply because they have all the guns. These regimes are unpopular, they govern poorly, but no one can do anything about it, because the guns, tanks and soldiers are all under their control, and they've decided that a peaceful transition of power is not an option they wish to entertain. It's entirely possible for this to be a stable state that lasts for a lifetime.
This particular stable state has lasted more than a lifetime. The average age in Cuba is 40, which while higher than many countries still means that the average Cuban has no living memory of any of the events that lead to the sanctions, much less could they have participated in them.
The Cuban regime has been able to produce an aura of legitimacy around itself through its history of resistance to US imperialism, or that's how it's framed, whether you take that at face value or how you interpret it is up to you.
If the brutal ugly side of US imperialism (in the form of military aggression or intense actually-illegal unitary sanctions etc) goes away, so does the legitimacy. People will be asking "why" they can't buy basic consumer goods, and the answer will not be believable in the slightest.
Cuba is not North Korea. It's not isolated in that way. Nor does it have a Juche style cult of self-reliance. It is heavily dependent on tourism for its economy. Even its official communist ideology emphasizes internationalist linkages and outlook.
The only people who find the Cuban regime legitimate would find an excuse to promote its legitimacy with or without sanctions. Trade would benefit the government of Cuba as it did with China and helping nations with totalitarian dictatorships is a failed strategy.
As the communists like to say "The capitalists will sell us our pitchforks".
Trade almost always undermines the despotic regimes. Corruption results in inefficiencies which can be exploited through trade by those wishing to compete with the regime, even for their own corrupt reasons. Fostering competition between corrupt entities. Sanctioning takes away these alternative sources of power and consolidates it entirely within the regime.
For example, Russia would have had a hard time policing their rambunctious oligarchs who would have used corruption to undermine the Putin regime to obtain more power for themselves - perhaps they could have supplied backing to Prigozhin with an offer that they could replace the Putin regime with something better. By sanctioning the oligarchs it forced all of the oligarchs to abandon any hope of competing with Putin and greatly strengthened Putins grip on power. Sanctioning polices the behavior of the Russian oligarchs much more effectively than Putins regime could have done, effectively outsourcing the cost of compliance to less corruptible 3rd parties.
Do I need to bring up the obvious counterfactual in China? I also disagree with your analysis on Russia, Putin's grip on power has not meaningfully changed due to sanctions. What has changed is Russia's ability to fund its war.
I see the same efforts to sanction China, especially with Chips as beneficial to China as continued trade would undermine their efforts to create an indigenous chip industry.
I guess you're referring to how trade has not lead to liberalism of the Chinese and I wasn't suggesting it would. There are plenty of elite in China who have benefited from trade outside of the regime and that's probably still one of the biggest threats to the regime within China. As soon a China loses the 'mandate from heaven' we could see the alternatives move in.
In case anyone else was confused, “mandate from heaven” is a Chinese political ideology. It is like the western concept of “Devine right” for kings, except that if your reign gets end by a revolution, it means you lost your mandate from heaven.
Not to be confused with the American Revolution era Navy flag that has a pine tree and the motto “an appeal to heaven”. That flag was recently in the news because the wife of a Supreme Court justice flew it at their house.
Complete nonsense. The policy has failed. The regime is still there after over half a century. Meanwhile the Cuban people suffer.
Maybe those words make you feel smart or strong or reinforce your ideological positions... but they're bad policy. Unless you cover your eyes and ignore evidence.
How has the policy failed? The regime is completely destitute. If we use China as the counterfactual, imagine the disaster of having a rich dictatorship aligned with our enemies right at our border.
Your mindset is that Cuban suffering is because of US sanctions. How about having the mindset of the leaders looting the country causing Cuban suffering?
As someone that is self-admittedly a leftist, why do you put 0 agency or blame on the leaders of Cuba? All they need to do to have trade with the US is to have free and open elections.
> All they need to do to have trade with the US is to have free and open elections.
That is truly hilarious. There are numerous countries, especially in Latin America, that can tell you a story or two about what happens when free and open elections fail to lead to the USA's chosen candidate winning. It's not sanctions being lifted, that's for sure.
Not to mention the US has made it very clear that it wants all confiscated property (from, uh [does math] 60-70 years ago) returned. Free elections won't do shit to satisfy prominent ex-pat groups.
No, it would not. Cuba has been a thorn in the USA's side since Teddy Roosevelt. I guarantee you that 200 years of history would not suddenly change if Cuba, say, democratically elected a pro-Russian socialist.
Also,the USA cares absolutely nothing about democracy in their partners. Never has, still doesn't. One of the USA's biggest curent allies is Saudi Arabia, one of the least democratic nations on Earth.
Where you and i disagree is that regime change is the sole goal of these sanctions. The purpose is to not help an enemy.
As for your argument around legitimacy, it does not matter. They will find an excuse to legitimize the government no matter what. See what venezuela did when we still had relations with their government.
All this talk of legitimacy actually just does not matter. Cuban people know their government sucks and if they havent realized it already they are too deep in the propaganda to ever be convinced
edit: Also out of curiosity, if this was a fascist dictatorship on the border would you advocate free trade?
If we assume that sanctions are the major barrier to Cuba's prosperity, a competent government that governed with the best interest of its people in mind would have been working for the past half century to try and convince the United States to lift those sanctions.
You would think that being less than 500 miles off the coast of Florida that Cuba would want to have strong relations with the USA rather than Russia over 6,000 miles away.
The Soviet Union fell in 1991. It should have been clear since then which horse Cuba should be betting on. Cuba has had 33 years to figure out that their revolution was dead. Their lack of success warming up relations with the USA and their failure to do so is on them.
Going to Cuba and talking to the Cubans made me realize how ridiculous American opinions on Cuba are.
They’re a wonderful people repressed by one of the world’s worst governments, and unlike, say, North Korea, they know it. They all have family in Florida. They are very aware of the outside world.
The sanctions in Venezuela are/were very different from the ones in Cuba, there is a prohibition of trade from any US company and its subsidiaries with Cuba with the exception of food, not some specific sectors aimed at supposedly weakening the government.
With that being said it could also be incompetence and/or corruption, but ignoring the embargo completely is just working to weaken your argument.
It wasnt sanctions but pretty much every extremely oil rich country that is fought over is a basket case, run by a vicious dictatorship or are the sole exception lucky enough to make it work - Norway.
Like Cuba, Venezuela was a poverty stricken mess before the socialists took power.
> Which is the consequence of being sanctioned into oblivion for decades by the global hegemon
or the consequence of having a clueless communist regime, since most communist countries do very poorly economically. Sanctions rarely give the whole picture.
Opinions like these are the reason why this “communism v capitalism” discussion never evolves beyond “them bad us good”.
China is often the target of anti communist propaganda so how do you square that hole? 1# economy when looking at GDP(PPP) so your “analysis” falls short.
Communist “regimes” often have to deal with outside interference from the “superior” capitalist system.
OP’s point is extremely valid: Cuba does not have the right to self determination as other countries impose themselves on them and prevent their economic growth.
The Cuba case is really quite interesting when you compare it to more recent cases of indivisibility of security.
We all have short memories I guess, super heros and cartoon villains.
> China is often the target of anti communist propaganda so how do you square that hole? 1# economy when looking at GDP(PPP) so your “analysis” falls short.
And that primarily came to be when they cut back on the centrally planned economy and allowed more free markets. Whether they will allow that to continue is to be seen.
> Communist “regimes” often have to deal with outside interference from the “superior” capitalist system.
No, they generally don't, but they use that as propaganda. Eastern Germany built their "anti-fascist barricade" in Berlin officially to keep the evil Western infiltrators out, but their guns were turned to the east, and they murdered people for trying to escape from communism. The Soviet Union as a whole often attributed its failures to the meddling of the Imperialistic West, because admitting that you messed up is dangerous.
Communists always find a reason for their failure, and it's never them. That's really nothing new.
they courted Western investment and resource-sharing with promises of access to their massive population, and then proceeded to steal and copy everything not nailed down, heavily restrict foreign firms' ability both to access their consumer markets and to repatriate capital, employed sweatshop labor, all while supporting quasi-state quasi-monopolies that literally could not fail in any meaningful way. Don't take this as unqualified criticism; it worked, and compensated for some of the worst injuries and excesses of the West's relations with the Chinese state. But the point is that it wasn't adherence to tenets of "fair-market capitalism" so much as abuse of labor and investor trust that gave them an edge. (And, to be fair, a tamer version of this strategy featured in America's own rise to economic powerhouse; Liu and Andrew, Ma and Ma Bell.)
Also, as an anecdote, the superfest story says hi. The Reds invented a superior glass manufacturing process that was ignored by the West until they could control and profit off it without it benefiting the USSR. You're familiar with it because it's (probably) the screen you're reading this on.
Was the USSR brutally sanctioned by a superpower? It was a superpower itself - it was supposed to be even more of a superpower!
"In the 1961 edition of his famous textbook of economic principles, Paul Samuelson wrote that GNP in the Soviet Union was about half that in the United States but the Soviet Union was growing faster. As a result, one could comfortably forecast that Soviet GNP would exceed that of the United States by as early as 1984 or perhaps by as late as 1997 and in any event Soviet GNP would greatly catch-up to U.S. GNP."
If Cuba were a free society instead of being run by communists they would have an economy that worked. This is the destruction caused by ~¾ of a century of central economic planning and Marxist ideology.
we criticize ourselves for sanctioning communist countries, but don't they necessarily have to be hostile to capitalist nations? I mean, assume their communism is working properly and "everyone gets the same" for all resources. Its pretty much a given that that level of resources will be less than a capitalist nation. If we accept the axiom that each person wants to maximize their resources, then we should expect a natural outflow from the communist nation to the capitalist one. In order to limit that, any ruler would be incentivized to pain the capitalist world as the enemy or make it a crime to affiliate/sympathize with them. this naturally leads to conflict between nations.
> Its pretty much a given that that level of resources will be less than a capitalist nation.
Why?
> If we accept the axiom that each person wants to maximize their resources, then we should expect a natural outflow from the [poorer] nation to the [richer] one. In order to limit that, any ruler would be incentivized to pain the [rich] world as the enemy or make it a crime to affiliate/sympathize with them. this naturally leads to conflict between nations.
(I replaced communist/capitalist with poor/rich since that's what your point is actually about.)
Are you saying that the poor world is naturally the enemy of the rich world? That the rich world should utilize its power (e.g. using sanctions) to keep the poor world (which in your view is the enemy) weak?
I don’t think you understand the history of Cuba, communism, capitalism, democracy, poverty, slavery, free markets, sanctions, or the interactions between all these things.
Nobody in Cuba “asked for”, what you call “poverty and slavery”.
There are over 2 million tourists a year to Cuba. So saying “even the tourists aren’t going any more” is factually incorrect. I’m not sure if numbers going up or down is related to “bread in resorts”. I suspect it isn’t a leading consideration for most.
The fastest growing economy of the last few decades is communist, and Vietnam and Laos just plod on, so while I might have sympathy that authoritarianism is a horrible system, I’m not sure I see the picture as bleak as you do.
I realise what I am about to ask you will come across as flippant, but I actually sincerely mean it. Could you go and read some books on the topics you think you’re an expert on before posting utter turgid nonsense you read on another forum here? I don’t want to live in a communist state, but I’m not so arrogant as to blame the citizens of a sanctioned authoritarian system for their own misery. Neither should you.
No: that free trade, low tariffs, and low export restrictions - free market principles - are implicitly championed by the supporters of insular, low freedom regimes that receive plaudits just because they had revolutionaries who promised free health care, university and the like, and they think these free trade principles happen in a vacuum.
I'm not pretending the USA doesn't meddle destructively or that Battista was some saint, but multidecade single party rule of Castro was an objective failure, along with the other Socialist regimes of the 20th century.
They are saying that if the many ways that socialist countries have failed, there is always a hundred different excuses for why that specific example of failure doesn't "count".
If your system is incapable of dealing with any sort of adversity, then that is failure of the system.
All countries around the world have problems.
And yet, most countries are able to deal with them. Unlikely, apparently, every major socialist country.
I have zero affection for the Castro regime, but it’s disingenous to characterize a multi-decade embargo by the closest trading partner, which is also a superpower, as “any kind of adversity” as if it were merely a bad harvest.
Most countries have an incredible amount of debt and have nothing to show for it. Moreover, the borrowed money accumulated in high proportion only in a handful of pockets, leaving behind a flimsy corrupted society.
What capitalist country would be able to deal with this level of sanctions that Cuba experiences?
People hoped that even such a huge capitalist country like Russia would fall after sanctions. Granted, did not work out because Russia found alternative allies in China and Iran but the idea that capitalist countries can just eat up sanctions like nothing is insane. Otherwise sanctions wouldn't be a political tool to begin with.
Lots of capitalist African countries have people just starving on mass and that is despite having free access to markets and despite western countries not only not sabotaging them but on the contrary providing development aid. But you will tell me how that is "not real capitalism" and how they are doing it wrong. Real capitalism is just the few rich Western Nations, we don't talk about the losers.
Communist revolutions tend to happen in the poorest countries on earth and they face adversity on every step of the way. That they even manage to survive shows how resilient socialism is.
There have been insanely huge successes in socialist countries.
The Soviet Union started from one of the least developed places on earth torn by WW1 and a bloody civil war and foreign intervention and became a global super power that would sent the first man into space.
As for Cuba, I will use the Western source someone else quoted here:
> The largest island in the Caribbean, Cuba is one of the most successful in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Food-based social safety nets include a monthly food basket for the entire population, school feeding programs, and mother-and-child health care programs.
Generally socialism has been quite successfully globally at providing high literacy rates and massive increases of life expectancy.
Most capitalist countries are utter failure. Even the richest country in the world the US has a huge issue with systemic poverty and a prison system that has one of the highest incarnation rates in the world. So there is the success? Norway living off from oil and gas?
At what expense did the Soviet Union do that? Millions imprisoned and killed by starvation and forced labor.
Commandeering an empire's wealth into militarization and the space program sure made for great pageantry just like North Korean nukes and cyberweapons, but it doesn't mean anything like a holistic measure of well being was achieved.
The space program used too much bread? How are these things related?
The space program started after WW2. There was never any famine in the Soviet Union after WW2 except the one directly after the was for obvious reasons.
And the militarization was necessary to survive against Nazi Germany and later to keep the balance of power intact against an empire that had proven two times that it was able and willing to use nuclear weapons.
The space program proved the importance of science under socialism and the great education system while the US only managed compete by stealing Nazi scientists.
> There have been insanely huge successes in socialist countries.
And yet those aren't the countries that people want to go live in.
The evidence speaks for it self. The capitalist countries are the ones with all the wealth, that everyone wants to move to, and the socialist ones are the countries that people want to escape.
If you will notice, we are right now talking on a thread about 10% of the population of cuba, leaving cuba.
> The Soviet Union
The thing that doesn't exist anymore? Some success that was.
> Most capitalist countries are utter failure
And yet, when a capitalist country fails, where do the people in that country want to leave to?
Oh, thats right. They want to go to other capitalist countries.
> the US has a huge issue
And yet, it one of the most desirable places in the world to live in, empirically proven by immigration rates.
> Generally socialism has been quite successfully
And yet the people actually living there still flee. No matter what metric you give, apparently the people living there don't care, because they still want to leave those countries and to move to capitalist countries.
Migration from poor countries to wealthier countries has always been a thing.
Communist revolutions tend to happen in the poorest countries so you are mistaking cause and effect. The countries that communism took hold on have been poor to begin with. Yes, communism is not magic and can not make you the richest country on earth overnight but neither can capitalism.
They don't. Official ideology is that they a going through a temporary capitalist phase and will switch to socialism once they developed enough to do so.
Obviously they wont. It was just a tactic to avoid the chaos of the fall of the Soviet Union while still changing out the economic system. Keeping political stability while allowing the people in power in enrich themselves thanks to capitalism.
A: We respond that socialism with Chinese characteristics is socialism
Full quote: Some have called our road "Social Capitalism", others "State Capitalism", and yet others "Technocratic Capitalism". These are all completely wrong. We respond that socialism with Chinese characteristics is socialism, by which we mean that despite reform we adhere to the socialist road – our road, our theory, our system, and the goals we set out at the 18th National Party Congress. ... Socialism with Chinese characteristics is the dialectical unity of the theoretical logic of scientific socialism and the historical logic of China's social development. It's scientific socialism rooted in Chinese realities, reflecting the will of Chinese people, and adapted to the requirements of China and its circumstances.
— Xi Jinping, speech to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, 5 January 2013[5]
Q: What does the Constitution say?
A: Article 1 The People's Republic of China is a socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants. The socialist system is the basic system of the People's Republic of China. Disruption of the socialist system by any organization or individual is prohibited.
From the preamble: After the founding of the People's Republic, China gradually achieved its transition from a New-Democratic to a socialist society. The socialist transformation of the private ownership of the means of production was completed, the system of exploitation of man by man abolished and the socialist system established. [...] China will be in the primary stage of socialism for a long time to come.
You have to read between the lines with those things. Note that "adhering to socialism" is not the same as having a socialist economy. Also being on the "socialist road" implies a process, not that they are already there. Also you left out an important part in your first quote
> and the goals we set out at the 18th National Party Congress. This includes building a socialist market economy;[..]
You might as well translate "socialist market economy" as capitalism with red flags. There is no market economy under socialism, that is the whole point.
No one in their right mind thinks China has a socialist economy. These people have decades of experience twisting ideology to whatever they want to do. Though Xi is whole bit less liberal than his predecessors. Some do argue that he plans to bring China back to a more socialist course but I am not sure about it. Personally, I think the growing socialist rhetoric is mostly a reaction to the growing wealth inequality and other problem in China.
The more important thing would seem to be what actually led to the immigration in the first place. In Cuba’s case it seems like widespread corruption and wholesale mismanagement by the government. This particular case doesn’t seem like an inevitable result of globalization but the natural reaction to a terrible government.
What's happening in Cuba has no resemblance to what happens in Southern Europe.
In Southern Europe, talent leaves for better job opportunities and higher salary. In Cuba, people are literally fleeing to achieve basic human rights and 21st century quality of life.
I'm not sure if you've been to Cuba before, but having visited in the late 2010s, it's a caricature of life in a communist dictatorship.
Internet wasn't allowed, except for in certain public parks at certain times of the day, only on phones with certain websites, and with dial-up speeds.
The sum total of fresh food in grocery stores was 1 type of government ham, 1 type of government cheese, eggs, a few fruits, and that was basically it.
I could go on. It's a beautiful island country, but please don't fall for the silly idea that US sanctions or european-style "brain drain" have anything to do with the reason Cubans are leaving.
Authoritarian communist dictatorships are no joke.
Whatever the reason, it's not so far fetched to assume the brightest are the first to leave. Or maybe the bravest, the most confident... I don't know. But better anyway.
I mean, sure, you can rephrase "fleeing a communist dictatorship" as "company men wanting more pay." But it dramatically understates the issue.
Moving from Madrid to Amsterdam to get a higher salary is not what we're talking about here. I don't think someone from Madrid would start weeping at the sight of a Dutch grocery store.
When Spain talks about brain drain, they're worried about 1-2% of their population leaving over decades. Not 10-20X than in a year.
Virtually all Cubans, regardless of educational attainment or employment status, would kill for a shot at life in a democratic, free-market country, be it Spain or the Netherlands. Hence why they're leaving.
I was about to share some of the traits of Cubans I know that serve as strong counter examples.
Then I realized this is all public, and Cuban intelligence services spy on the diaspora.
Censorship by proxy sucks.
I’ve run into this before with Chinese and other nationalities. I don’t know what’s safe to say, and what could get someone in trouble. So the ethical thing is to say nothing, unless it’s really important.
It sucks that foreign powers can censor a conversation like this, but they can.
That should put pressure on the deserted areas to increase compensation or offer better CoL in return for production. Similarly, it increases demand on housing and other services in global cities, putting pressure on the workers to move to greener pastures. Of course none of this works as intended due to outsized govt. intervention and corruption.
Frequently the country people are leaving also benefits. Many emigrants send money back to family. Some amount of emigrants moves back and bring what they learned with them. I've read the argument by Bryan Kaplan that this is a big factor why Puerto Rico is doing better than most of the island surrounding it.
Of course Cuba being Cuba makes all these benefits harder or undesirable.
taken a step further, you can consider that cities have very lower birth rates compared to the country side, meaning the intelligent people move to the cities, where they will produce less offspring.
This leaves the gene pool itself deserted. Spandrell controversially wrote about this, calling cities "iq shredders".
Cuba was hit extremely hard by the COVID crisis, is my understanding.
Not just internal policies and procedures, but consider that tourism is Cuba's #1 industry. And not many of us Canadians, etc. were heading down there spring 2020, winter 2021 or even winter 2022...
I see it as complete opposite. They did it because they could: for a long while, U.S. admitted virtually everyone as a refugee without even an attempt to cook up a plausible story. That happened only in 2022-2024.
It's a no brainer to see no one ever wanted to live in Cuba. Trick is having a place to go. Until the politically opportunistic immigration loophole was closed this year, they had.
> Trick is having a place to go. Until the politically opportunistic immigration loophole was closed this year, they had.
What loophole changed?
The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 still applies. They get automatic Green Cards. Not sure it is fair to call legislation implicitly giving them work permits and a path to residency a loophole.
As the old joke from behind the Iron Curtain said...
Q: "What would happen in Saudi Arabia if Communism triumphed there?"
A: "First, shortage of oil, later, shortage of sand."
Edit: for all the downvoters, shortages were our daily lived experience when I was a kid. I still remember chasing such rare stuff as "kid's sneakers" or "toilet paper".
And Czechoslovakia was still better off than neighbouring Poland, where you could walk into a shop and find literally nothing in the shelves.
The black market was the only thing that reliably worked.
It's funny because Saudi Arabia's neighbour Yemen is the only gulf state that had a (Soviet-sponsored) socialist government, and maybe not entirely coincidentally is an order of magnitude poorer than the other gulf states, and has done a terrible job of tapping its oil resources.
Wasn't that deliberate oppression though? Not that I'm pro-communism as an ideal or anything (I favour free-market conservatism) I'm just not sure it can be blamed for ineptitude/mismanagement there as the joke implies?
It was mostly incompetence mixed with a lot of corruption and petty theft.
Publicly owned businesses had no incentives to compete on quality, had to fulfill centralized plans designed by distant bureaucrats that weren't completely attached to reality. Western products were mostly unavailable or extremely costly, so no substitution possible. Lots of ossified monopolies. Factory leaders were often chosen on the base of being someone's nephew or protégé rather than expert.
If you applied for a phone line (plain old copper wire), you could wait up to 10 years before you actually got it, as there was a waiting list of 300 000 applicants in a country of 15 million ... ugh. The mess.
It is hard to describe the omnipresent dysfunction of everyday life back then. Communism was a theoretical system dreamed out by intellectuals who never engaged in any commerce. All the violent oppression aside, economic side of Communism was just crazily inefficient.
every "open and capitalist" country also had 10yrs wait for a copper phone line. besides the top 3 countries economically at the time from were you hear your make believe stories, most other countries until the 80sv phone line contacts were used to buy cars and homes. sometimes the lines were not even installed.
If you want to be a dictator, then you have to say you’ll be a benevolent dictator and that people will have work and there will be food and they will have shelter and an education. Would-be dictators don’t get very far telling people they’ll be cold and hungry.
My country (Brazil) has been slowly becoming socialist over decades. Today we live under the rule of a socialist president, a communist supreme court. This is reality despite the fact Venezuela and Argentina are our neighbours. There are way too many people here who actually believe in this nonsense.
As a Cuban that is currently living in Cuba, I think it might be useful to voice my opinions, as I have read some comments here which I consider less than accurate in some respects. To avoid typing too much, I'll summarize with... bullet points?
* The published figure of 10 million people is already outdated. First, they are official figures, which means that they are not telling the truth. Second, six months have elapsed; which means the actual number of residents is less than 9 million.
* Not only a large amount of people are gone, but most of them are young, productive people; lots of them professionals in several critical aspects of a functioning society. Where I work I'm only one of the few that remains in my activity (IT & IT adjacent).
* Also gone are many of the more... reactive? brave? People that voiced discontent with the government and just chose to leave. What remains are relatively elderly people that are very conformist, or simple are not brave enough to voice their concerns.
* Is Cuba a dictatorship? No.
* Is Cuba a totalitarian state? Absolutely. The Cuban Communist Party is the only one allowed, as is written in the (relatively recent) Constitution. Even more than that, it exists above the Constitution, so this texts has no value at all.
* Are there human rights violations in Cuba? Yes, no doubt.
* Does the US embargo negatively impacts Cuba? Absolutely. Every single day, for the common people, that is. The elites? The top dogs of the Party? Of course they are unaffected; they are your run of the mill corrupt people in power, and they can have anything.
* Can Cuba trade with other countries? In theory, yes... in practice, it is very difficult. In addition, Cuba is a minuscule market that interests no one. China, for instance, has very little presence in Cuba, despite we being "allies". But they don't care.
I don't know how this could unfold in the future, except with a total collapse. I really wish the end of the embargo, and the possibility of open an free elections. We, common people, are at the mercy of US politics and being managed by inmensely incompetent leaders. We could debate all week on who's at fault here, who threw the first stone, but, as of this moment, that would be sterile. This country will be gone.
Argentino here. I think Venezuela is going through the same issues. We had A LOT of Venezuelan immigrants in Arg and Chile and they said the same thing you're saying: that people leaving were the "brave, smart, willing to work people" and the ones remaining were the scum.
Can I ask you what are the reasons you decide to stay?
Im in a similar situation than GP. Leaving can be expensive and dangerous, more so if one does not have support on the other side. I have people that directly depend on me (little kids, elderly parents) and not just financially. Some people may say "you can help them better when you are out, send remittances, get them out too" but its just complicated.
I do have the opportunity to leave, yes. But, on the one hand, there's immediate family that depends on me (and not just economically.) On the other hand, I'm approaching an age which I feel does not makes me very hireable, so to speak, despite my 30+ years of experience in the field.
Yes, the situation is dire; and I'll be here to witness how this unfolds :|
In the past, when Fidel Castro was alive and in full posession of his faculties, you could easily say that he was a dictator. Everything of importance was designed, implemented, and micro managed by him. The man was a megalomaniac and, and history would show, also incompetent; but boy, the cult of personality goes deep here, not only in mass media but many of the sicophants.
Today the Secretary General has no power. Everybody knows that; along with the fact that he is also a puppet with the charisma of bucket half filled with sand. Guidance and executive power come first from the Central Committee; which I'm sure follows "tips" and "recommendations" from Raúl Castro (Fidel's brother), a man that should be effectively retired. Everybody knows that's not the case.
However, and being honest, I really don't care about labeling this place as a dictatorship or not (it is a fuzzy concept for me, and I won't fight hard for one or the other). Unless there's a clear definition, labels are sometimes subjective. Hell, this is not even a communist country, despite what they themselves like to present; this is not the dictatorship of the proletariat. And never was.
When I was there the painted picture I was taught was different than what I saw.
I am not a dictator in my house. No one would say that either. They would say I do make the rules and have final authority. Can I determine our living conditions? Yes. I try to run a good house and love those under my care. We are communists in practice. Not by name.
> Hardliners have grown worried that the experiment with capitalism could threaten the government’s tight grip on power, and the Cuban military, which used to control most foreign currency coming into the island, is viewing these companies as competition, sources in Cuba said.
How much blame does the military have for the mass exodus of Cubans?
The military is where all the real power is concentrated, and not because of being military per se. They have no might whatsoever in relation to other countries... they probably have two working jets from the 1970s, four boats with rotting hulls, eleven pistols, and eight rifles. However, they do have a shadow and parallel economic system that exists beyond public scrutiny. By design. Quoting the Treasury Department: Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (GAESA) is a Cuban military-controlled umbrella enterprise with interests in the tourism, financial investment, import/export, and remittance sectors of Cuba’s economy. GAESA’s portfolio includes businesses incorporated in Panama to bypass CACR-related restrictions.
Those people can, and do, summon whatever resources they need to do whatever they want. In particular, the idea that Cuba should be a tourist destination has made them build hotels left and right, bleeding other services dry. And by services, I mean, everything else. That's why everything is in decay, collapsing, and why people choose to leave (one of the reasons, of course).
The United States is singular in its ability to assimilate immigrants. It is our one true superpower. The people who come to our country, like these Cubans fleeing their country, often come from societies where they lack freedoms Americans take for granted. Many Americans scarcely even acknowledge these freedoms but immigrants with their outside eye see them clearly. In doing so they refresh our founding ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
As a fourth generation American and midwesterner, I welcome these Cuban immigrants.
This is false. The US does not interfere with Cuban internal economy nor does the US Cuban trade embargo prevent Cuba from trading with other countries. Cuba’s disastrous economy is a direct consequence of the policies of its communist government, not external forces.
This just does not seem plausible. Sure, I understand the claim that Cuban statistics are falsified because the Cuban government is obviously biased about whether "Cuba is good", but the claims about Cuban emigration are coming from groups that are very distinctly anti-Cuban themselves; why should I trust them to tell the truth about Cuba, particularly when lying about your enemies is incredibly effective, common, and completely unpunished?
> A stunning 10% of Cuba’s population — more than a million people — left the island between 2022 and 2023, the head of the country’s national statistics office said during a National Assembly session Friday, the largest migration wave in Cuban history.
Is Cuba's national statistics office "distinctly anti-Cuban"?
The published figure of 10 million people is already outdated. First, they are official figures, which means that they are not telling the truth. Second, six months have elapsed; which means the actual number of residents is less than 9 million.
US embargos are much, much more than just preventing Country <-> US trades.
- The US applies embargo transitively. That means any movement of fund related to an embargoed country and transiting to the US is illegal. In other words, you cannot use a US bank, mortgage, funding, accounting firm, etc for these trades.
- The US applies extra territotial rules to USD. Any trade involving USD, even if completely remote to the US, is under US jurisdiction.
These constraints make a US embargo a very, very high bar to do any kind of trade.
> Note that it's only the US that has an embargo against Cuba.
And that's the only embargo that matters. Given a choice between an embargo by the US or embargo by the rest of the world, cuba and every country in the world would choose 'the rest of the world'. Especially so for cuba since it's just right off the coast of florida.
> The rest of the world trades pretty freely with them.
> Given a choice between an embargo by the US or embargo by the rest of the world, cuba and every country in the world would choose 'the rest of the world'.
You really think countries will willing choose to trade with the USA over the rest of the world when it isn't the biggest destination for their exports nor their major source of imports? Why would they do that exactly?
> You really think countries will willing choose to trade with the USA over the rest of the world when it isn't the biggest destination for their exports nor their major source of imports? Why would they do that exactly?
Yes, any day. Because US embargos prevent you from trading in USD, which is pretty much the de facto currency for any trade due to its stability and backing.
Also, even if you manage to settle your trade in say EUR, you now have to trade without using any US intermediary. Nothing related to this trade can involve a US bank, payment system, legal firm, etc.
A US embargo is pretty much the worst thing that can happen to a country. Only if your country has already strong ties to the middle east, Russia or China can you hope to do any sort of export.
I swear some Americans seem to think the world they live in is from 1955 or 1975 or something. The US is just one player amongst many, a very important one but by no means the paramount one for every country in the world. The idea it is simply isn't backed by facts on the ground.
So yea, if forced to choose between USA vs Rest of World virtually every country will choose RoW. Americans are delusional if they think they can just snap their fingers and everybody else will jump to attention.
Don't know much about embargoes but at least with GPUs it's much more evil
Even if GPU manufacturer sells GPUs to a company which is not in embargo list they usually have agreements in place about not reselling them to the companies in embargo list
Cuba’s ability to trade with the rest of the world severely impaired by the US embargo.
Most international banks get very nervous about facilitating transactions involving Cuba and even tourists who visit Cuba can have their travel to the US restricted.
”The United States has threatened to stop financial aid to other countries if they trade non-food items with Cuba.”
"While the US measures against Cuba do not amount to a blockade in a technical or formal sense, their cumulative effect is to put an economic stranglehold on the island, which not only prevents the United States intercourse but also effectively blocks commerce with other states, their citizens and companies."
”Despite the existence of the embargo, Cuba can, and does, conduct international trade with many countries, including many US allies; however, US-based companies, and companies that do business with the US, which trade in Cuba do so at the risk of US sanctions.”
The US embargo includes NATO members. I don’t have the source handy at the moment but it’s clear that any current trade partners with the US would be violating the embargo if they attempt read with Cuba.
My friend's father can't travel to the US anymore (including transfer flights through) because he is higher up in a nickel mining company that does a lot of business in Cuba. Bank accounts, trading accounts, wire transfers, etc.. nothing can go through the US. Ships that dock in Cuban ports can't then go on to dock in US ports. etc. etc. etc
It seems the US in 1996-97 barred executives from at least two other companies doing business with Cuba from entering the US. I can’t seem to find any information about them having financial sanctions against them however.
This kind of numbers are not auditted. Might as well a journalist fake the numbers while in washing room cubicle (happened before). So just take this reading litely.
I support immigration and oppose the Republican anti-immigrant platform because it seems to me there is significant brain drain from many countries to the U.S. and that contributes to our success.
For example, in this article is about white collar crime, it points out that many Somali-Americans were professionals back in Somalia. I'm not concerned about the crime because that seems like a somewhat higher tendency until the 2nd and 3rd generation is able to make it into established society.
A Somali-American former investigator: why you’re hearing about fraud in my community
You may not be concerned about the crime, but many voters are. The author of the article you linked to also exhorts the Somali immigrant community to not engage in crime.
> because that seems like a somewhat higher tendency until the 2nd and 3rd generation is able to make it into established society.
History and data from various European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations, and remain ghettoized with low employment and high crime rates (vastly higher than the native population, for certain categories of crime).
It's clear that the national interest is in accepting skilled immigrants who migrate legally and are able to integrate fully into the host society, a la Teddy Roosevelt's dropping of the hyphen. It is not desirable to have separate ethnic groups who "share the same language, culture and faith" distinct from the mainstream.
> various European nations [...] some immigrant groups
American Jew here, who spent years living in France and Spain. I've heard the same polite euphemisms refering to Arabs and Gypsies from the mouths of members of the Front National. You know, before 1945 it was said in Europe that Jews weren't able to integrate fully with the host society.
One might ask: Was that the Jews' fault? Or the host society's fault?
It's a relevant question. You are blaming it on the particular group of migrants involved in the case of Europe right now. But historically Europe has ghettoized other groups.
When the US ghettoized Chinese economic migrants, American politicians claimed they could never integrate. And yet the Chinese-American population is well integrated and hugely successful since the host society allowed it. Same with Jews in America, and increasingly with Hispanics.
Why is it that economic migrants do, after a few generations, become successfully integrated in America, while they tend not to in Europe?
I don't think the evidence definitively supports the conclusion that it's down to which group. Europe has a problem with integration that has its roots in the ethnic character of its states (something America does not have), in deep-seated xenophobia that causes social exclusion of immigrant or out-groups, and in the fact that its states' reasons for existence are based on tribal boundaries and wars for territory rather than on achieving broader democratic and economic flourishing by harnessing the capability of the whole population. And thus Europe presents neither a dream of integration nor a path toward integration (as in, "to become American"; there is neither an equivalent aspiration nor option "to become French"). And then, once again, Europe blames the groups it refuses to accept.
Subtle topic. In France there were waves of italians and spaniards in the early 20th, it went bad for a short while and then became a non issue apparently (being born in the 80s, these groups were never causing trouble in the slightest). Sharing history probably helps too.
I also never felt any issue regarding Jewish people but considering this was after ww2 .. nobody would really say a thing either, but personally they never displayed anything noteworthy society wise. another non issue
Now it's African, northern African populations being at the forefront of news, but personally i had many more issues with them (and i'm partially brown so the chances of them thinking I'm too different are lower). regularly they displayed very low morals, aggressiveness, sudden high fanaticism toward religious principles they didn't really grasp, worse behavior in school.
My mother knew people from Asia (Vietnamese, Cambodians) fleeing from war, with no resources, not speaking french, nothing in common with Europe, they mentioned seeing some racism, yet they too ended up being a non issue. They end up being as the cliche quiet-asian-1st-in-class kid and that's the end of it.
It's possible France or other European countries have some underlying, hard to describe, notion of integration. It's less economical and more about mentality ? Maybe except UK, where it's often said that anybody will to work would rapidly integrate. I still can't say.
> And then, once again, Europe blames the groups it refuses to accept.
Can you explain in what way did this manifest in Sweden for instance? Or have any data/evidence besides some semi-vague claims about antisemitism and some immutable characteristics of European societies (which are hardly monolithic to begin with).
It's not that I even necessarily disagree with what you're saying but unfortunately your comment is 80% demagoguery and 20% substance.
> Why is it that economic migrants do, after a few generations, become successfully integrated in America, while they tend not to in Europe?
Possible different population samples that don't overlap as much? By and large (unless you're crossing the Mexican border I guess...) immigrating to the US has been significantly harder than to the EU even if you're educated/relatively high skilled. The US can afford to be much more picky.
> One might ask: Was that the Jews' fault? Or the host society's fault?
There are 2x more Jews in France than before WW2? Guess from where most of the threats/attacks towards them are coming? (hint: not the host society).
As a Swede, we have always been very bad letting foreigners in. Most, even otherwise liberal and well educated, have been low key racist. One part has been that anyone not speaking perfect Swedish has been seen as bit stupid. Having a foreign sounding name has made it much harder to get to an interview. Imagine growing up with hard working parents with engineering or medical degrees working as cleaners because no one wants to employ them because of their names or the way they speak. Would you be motivated to study or work hard? The only places where you feel welcome are in the mosques or in a gang.
What gives me a bit of hope is that this seem to be quite rapidly changing, at least in part of society. I have been working at a company in central Stockholm where none! of about 100 employees had even immigrated parents. I’m working in a large company right now where some departments still are 100% native Swedes, but other, that see what a waste it is to not use all this talent, employ 50% or more first or second generation of immigrants.
To be honest, it's also the quality of migrants that Sweden receives. The migrants joining gangs or getting radicalized in Sweden are primarily ones who arrived as asylum seekers, usually without much language and marketable job market skills, and with conservative cultural background that can be a burden. This is a big contract to the United States, which doesn't receive anywhere near as many refugees (adjusted to its size), and is generally more picky about migrants.
The welfare system doesn't work well with integration either. If all that is available to you are bad jobs due to your lack of job market / language skills, why work if welfare pays almost the same?
I think Sweden does a decent job integrating those migrants who arrive with sufficient skills for the job market. It's the rest that are problematic, and they would probably do better in the US with its lack of welfare state.
>I think Sweden does a decent job integrating those migrants who arrive with sufficient skills for the job market. It's the rest that are problematic, and they would probably do better in the US with its lack of welfare state.
As a (technically) second generation migrant born and raised I doubt this. This is a sentiment mostly only shared by isolated liberal wing of the society, who probably don't really mingle with expat population beyond surface chatter.
And it's not just some racism sentiment but as the post you replied to insinuate, general xenophobic / supremacist sentiments. I even know other (white) Europeans with great education and jobs getting sick of this place because just how condescending and unfriendly people in general are, for petty things such as unperfect Swedish. (Native English speaking migrant being the only exception)
>I think Sweden does a decent job integrating those migrants who arrive with sufficient skills for the job market. It's the rest that are problematic, and they would probably do better in the US with its lack of welfare state.
Tbh I doubt it. If it's anything like German society, which is incredibly insular, just being non-German is enough to make you unwelcome.
I am a British immigrant in Germany and I can vouch for how impossible it is to integrate into these northern European societies, if the rest are anything like Germany. I tick all the boxes of what German boomers would want in a "Good Immigrant" (white, educated, from western Europe, speaks German, good job), but it doesn't help.
I think overall Germans, deep down, don't really want us here. We are here to pay for the pension bill—that's literally it. But since we are here, they want us to completely assimilate and give up everything about yourself that came from our homelands. There is no respect nor appreciation for any external culture, so your "differences" have negative value, because you have to Be German.
I dated a third generation Turkish German for 2 years whilst I lived here and she faced fairly casual racism from white Germans with a regularity that would be unthinkable in the UK. She was often getting complimented on how good her German (it's her mother tongue) was or asked about what country she came from (she was born and raised in Germany). It's a racist country. Don't believe the PR about how liberal Germany is—it's liberal if you're white and German.
And I say all this as a white Western European. It's going to be so much harder for the average Syrian or Afghan.
I - a white German - got verbally attacked in the subway of Berlin by a man because I looked somehow foreign to him... So even being white and German sometimes doesn't help... Being from the wrong side of the village can be bad enough.
Integration is hard - I recently went to an intergration event at a local church - almost no Germans there - and also the different foreign communities didn't really interact with each other. E.g. there's severe hatered between the different groups of Turkish people.
I think there are a lot of outsiders in German society - ethnic integration is hard. Maybe Special interest groups - like Computer Meetups or Maker-Spaces can help with Integration into a new Clan?!
I really think you're right. Actually I do truly believe everyone suffers under the prevailing German attitude towards social contact and human interaction. It's just worse for immigrants, because we've even more outsiders and often visibly so.
While being an exchange student in Asia I met an Austrian girl studying in Germany. Her best friend was Iranian-German, born and raised in Germany. When they both tried to apply for renting places close to Uni, several times her Iranian-German friend was ignored by the land lords.
Even though the Austrian girl had heavy accent and technically being the migrant, her "germanic" name and white face gave her access to the most basic thing:housing; something a German born Iranian (studying engineering, well educated and mannered), will struggle to have. One of the landlord she met, an old lady, even explicitly said she was happy "a German" applied and she felt she would take care of the place better.
Similar discrimination exist in Japan, where I lived. All my European expat friends complained about how they struggle getting apartments because landlord silently decline based on their foreigner name.
Very few of them even want to BELIEVE the above Austrian girls story. The common reply is always questioning the story. Maybe some other reason, it's an anecdote, how can she be sure. (when the Austrian girl tell her German friends same questioning occur)
At the core of it the unfriendliness of northern Europe + Germany is a double punch: you're often silently discriminated, and when you try to voice it, you're often gaslighted.
At least in USA or other English speaking places those voices are allowed to be voiced, without condemnation (people will debate it, but we won't even get there for places like Germany or Sweden )
Yeah this is extremely common, surnames are probably the single most important thing in Germany when it comes to finding quality housing. Actually the housing market in Germany is really bad, somehow seemingly even worse than the British one, albeit in different ways. All the Germans I know live really well, because finding somewhere to live is more about connections ("Vitamin B", Genossenschaft, friend/colleague "giving" you their contract/flat) and being German (so you're not filtered based on your surname) than anything else. Of course, if you're an immigrant then you're unlikely to have connections, and it's unlikely your dad signed you up to a Genossenschaft 20 years ago.
Some Germans may like to think of Germany as a country of immigrants, but it just isn't, regardless of how many live here.
I was blamed of being "too white" in the australian outback by british descendants. And quote "should go back to your country" which I would have done anyway.
Continental Europeans have very bad experiences with British tourists. I really like Brits, but just if they stay on their Islands. And I am quite sure I get support from around a 100 Million dead guys from India.
Turks are a very big community (I guess more than 20 Million counting all generations) in Germany with a lot of not well adapted folk.
In my 2500 souls german home village live people from more than 40 nations. I never heard negative comments about them from one of the natives. But the shithole you live in of course may vary.
Aren't you just proving my point, though? Your post is objectively xenophobic.
> Continental Europeans have very bad experiences with British tourists
Funnily enough I've never been anywhere where our trashy British tourists go (why would I?). So actually I don't know what they're like, but I've heard very bad things. I've also heard even worse things about the Dutch, though.
> And I am quite sure I get support from around a 100 Million dead guys
Well whoever they are that you're talking about, they are dead, so I am not sure they're in a position to support you at all. Having said that, I wonder what the all the dead Europeans and Jews murdered by Germans would think of Germany.
> But the shithole you live in of course may vary
I live and work in Hamburg.
>Turks are a very big community (I guess more than 20 Million counting all generations) in Germany with a lot of not well adapted folk.
Yes, because of how the majority ethnic German population treated them and continues to treat them. It's a very racist country. That's what living and working in Germany and falling in love with a Turkish German taught me. Thank you for the cultural exchange.
I think it's great you're engaging in casual anglophobia and xenophobia, it just perfectly demonstrates how xenophobic Germany is, it's such a nice example.
I have a funny story, my grandfather actually was German and fought for the Nazi German Empire in WW2 and moved to the UK afterwards. He used to cry about how much worse the English were and how unfair it all is that the Nazi German Empire (your Nazi ancestors) is vilified compared to the English. Will you bring up the Boer War now? He used to do that too. Anyway it's all very on brand for a German to give off pretty familiar national socialist vibes. Takes me right back to my childhood trying to navigate interactions with that autistic old man :')
Funnily enough, they do say that German society is like one where everyone is autistic. It all adds up!
Actually your post is really useful, thanks. It's a perfect display of how so many Germans respond to criticism of their country by immigrants who live there.
Reader: never let anyone tell you Germans aren't nationalistic. They are as nationalistic as anyone, they are simply more subtle about it and eschew overt symbolism.
>I doubt your objectivism.
Yes, to truly understand the racism of Germany, I have to witness someone who I do not give a shit about being victimised. If I care about that person, then it doesn't count and I am not allowed to form an opinion. Lol.
> Can you explain in what way did this manifest in Sweden for instance? Or have any data/evidence besides some semi-vague claims about antisemitism and some immutable characteristics of European societies (which are hardly monolithic to begin with).
If you live in Sweden then you will also know that the state puts refugees in the same areas (Rinkeby, Vivalla, Tensta, etc ...). These areas are then labeled as unsafe because of a slightly elevated crime rate and because they're labeled unsafe, swedes start moving out and quality of services and house prices drop and the downward spiral continues until the area becomes a ghetto even though they're usually not that bad.
Although SFI exists to teach Swedish to immigrants, the quality of the teaching is not great in most schools.
That's where the integration effort stops.
Even professionals who move to Sweden for work have a hard time integrating in Swedish society. That's how you end up with people living in upscale parts of Stockholm for 10+ years and can barely form a sentence in Sweden.
> state puts refugees in the same areas (Rinkeby, Vivalla, Tensta, etc ...).
No it doesn't. Refugees are placed in municipalities all over Sweden but most choose to move to the big cities as soon as they can and end up in these districts because they are the cheapest.
> slightly elevated crime rate.
Citation needed. Compared to what? Casual crime is very high compared to traditional Swedish society. Also a lot of crime goes unreported because the locals don't trust the police to be able to do anything.
> That's where the integration effort stops.
Simply not true. There are oodles of integration efforts all over Sweden at many levels; public projects, local initiatives and on top of that immigration heavy areas gets more public funding than average for schools, after-school activities, park/street cleanings, etc.
> Even professionals who move to Sweden for work have a hard time integrating in Swedish society.
That's because Swedish is a small language and most professionals don't plan on staying.
Most Swedish professionals speak English on a native speaker level and most large Swedish companies has English as the official corporate language.
In my experience most non-English speakers that comes to Sweden spend their efforts on becoming fully proficient in English while the English speakers are delighted to find that they can use English everywhere in society.
Learning Swedish has a very low priority and after a couple of years most expats grows tired of the cold, darkness, taxes, low salaries, etc.
In my opinion, refugees should be spread out and placed among neighbors who are willing to interact positively with them and invite them to stuff so they can integrate, and NOT allowed to relocate their residence for 5-10 years. That will be better for the country. Beggars can’t be choosers, they’re happy to get asylum.
How to enforce that: fine whoever sells/rents to them outside where they are supposed to live. And threaten to deport them if they move without the years passing or showing they’ve integrated / learned the language / culture etc.
Obviously, exceptions can be made for reasons of safety or being closer to a job they got, but then the same procedure should be followed (spread out and surrounded by neighbors willing to help integrate them).
They should also have access to resource to accelerate the cultural integration, like meetups and schools etc.
I like the idea of setting an immigration quota based on how many meighborhoods overwhelmingly vote to welcome immigrants, and then requiring the immigrants to live in those neighborhoods as a condition if their immigration status.
If the immigrants enrich the community, those who welcomed them get the enrichment.
If the immigrants bring crime and disease, those who welcomes them get the crime, disease, and decreased property values.
I love solutions that work whether my views are right or wrong.
May I steal that for part of my political platform?
Sure. It sounds very bottom-up and libertarian, the kind of libertarian I am is exactly this thing … making a new bottom-up system with software, giving people the tools to self-organize, get critical mass in various local areas, and then using the new tech to bring about change by working with the old top-down structures.
Facebook and Uber and AirBNB did it in social networking and transportation and housing, respectively, starting in colleges and cities.
I am doing it for all kinds of things, and sometimes selling it to political campaigns such as I did with https://qbix.com/yang2020.pdf but that is not really my goal, just to help some politicians was never my goal
I put out a few apps like Groups on iOS and so far we attracted a million small community leaders in 100 countries, who have our app on their phones. So the first phase (bottom-up) is under way
Years I go I met with Rohingya Project guys and working together to create the R Coin, Identity and Academy on decentralized platform for the Rohingya refugees:
https://rohingyaproject.com/platform/
Now this year for the first time, we got a VC (Balaji’s fund) leading our round for Network States. Balaji is a big proponent of these (kind of like Estonia’s e-residency), his fund also has Naval Ravikant, Fred Wilson and others on their investment commitee… basically a lot of people involved in Web3 (CoinBase, CoinList, etc.)
So if you’re serious about doing the first part of the solution (software) I recommend you can do it in software, and working on the ground with small towns and neighborhoods. I already have a platform doing just that, so if you want to do it locally, we can reach out about doing something together. We’re eventually looking to go to every part of the world, but currently we’re at a stage of just doing local pilots. Look at my profile and you can email me.
And/or come to the Singapore conference on September 22nd and let’s all meet and discuss there in person :)
But PS: our platform isn’t only about resettling refugees, although it is a big part. It’s about dating, job boards, local currencies, and much more. I think that if Donald Trump and Co get into office again, there will be a huge “crypto summer” but we need to use crypto for actual applications like the one I mentioned, with global donation crowdfunding and transparency and benefitting the stateless people on the ground, instead of crazy ponzi schemes round 4 LOL.
Do it! Start-up meet-ups and find a way to make the labor, especially the idle labor, more productive. This is entreprenuerism. It is also hard and then there are the costs--who pays?
> Citation needed. Compared to what? Casual crime is very high compared to traditional Swedish society. Also a lot of crime goes unreported because the locals don't trust the police to be able to do anything.
Citation needed? You haven't provided a single citation for any of the wild claims you've made.
It’s not the state that put the immigrants there, but outside those areas it’s almost impossible to find something to rent, and as an immigrant without a steady income it’s kind of impossible to buy anything.
I should be clear... I'm not talking about Nordic countries regarding Jews. Swedes, Norwegians and Danes are considered heroes in this regard, and the historical analogies to the rest of Western Europe don't hold. There was no history of ghettoization or discrimination there. I am not applying my criticism there.
It should be said that the pre-WW2 Jewish population of Sweden was miniscule, but that Swedes took great personal risks to save these refugees from a culture they did not know.
The rise in antisemitic attacks in France, conducted entirely by Muslim immigrants, is a feature of the weakness of the French pluralist/secularist and legal state which again appears to be failing to integrate new arrivals into its Enlightenment ideals. One hopes Sweden doesn't fall into the same trap. But my gripe is about integration, and historically Sweden has not had to deal with anything on the scale of what is happening now.
I agree that our social, educational and cultural institutions are doing an absolutely atrocious job of integrating immigrant populations.
Despite that, I find that most people I know from the Maghreb are actually quite well integrated, mostly because as an educated, well-to-do person I hang around with other educated, well-to-do people and they tend to be quite nice to get along with.
I grew up in Houston (arrived age 6, left just before my 18th birthday), and honestly I find the way 'native'/anglo Texans treat Mexicans (more properly, Hispanics, but over there everyone calls them Mexicans) to be probably slightly worse on average than the way French people treat people of African descent.
However, the French welfare state + my god our educational system is so fucked it's not even funny mean that it's possible to get certain pathological cases where an immigrant will move to France, live off the welfare state while railing against everything French (post-colonial hatred) and then use that sweet welfare money to plan and execute terrorist attacks.
I don't blame that one the innate character of French people though, just on badly designed social institutions. Our current welfare state was modified by well-meaning leftists who were aiming to make something more egalitarian, but instead made everything worse, and then modified by well-meaning neoliberals who were aiming to make something more efficient, but instead made everything worse, and now it's starting to look like a big ugly pile of legacy code written in Perl.
This is a fair take. And my experience with Arabs who are well off and relatively secular in France and Spain, and even more so Maghrebis who quietly identify as Berbers, tracks with what you mean as far as their integration and acceptance. But I did live in Avignon for awhile and saw some of the worst of the well-meaning welfare state in action, just outside the city walls.
I'm not blaming the character of the French any more than the character of the Arabs, I just think the system is not built in a way like America where assimilation is the goal of either party.
If you don't mind, I'll chime in with an American perspective. America is itself not a perfect case on immigration. Beyond high-profile recent developments under Trump: per our history of official, state-led segregation - within living memory, and certainly within the memory of much of our existing municipal and physical infrastructure, and which famously was, in part, a model for what the Third Reich aimed to achieve - the road to assimilation for the individuals and populations seeking it is not of equal length and equally unimpeded for everyone.
Being educated helps a lot. Being wealthy helps a lot. Speaking English helps a lot. Being white helps a lot. Not having these attributes is not a deal-breaker (we DID manage to elect a black president), but they do significantly effect how someone and their children might be able to access the greater community, education, jobs, and more, and particularly outside of the immigrant community they might belong to. This is exacerbated by the state of our geography: America is big, and spread-out, and was built in its current form with an eye toward advantaging car-ownership and ethnic/economic segregation. It is possible to come to this country as someone who is not American, become American, and then become fabulously successful as an American, but it's not a given, and there are often headwinds.
It's a difficult problem. We shouldn't despair because our governments haven't been able to tackle it. It's one worth continuing to try at because the alternatives (terrorism and internecine violence on one end, a form of genocide on the other) are horrible.
I feel you are a bit harsh in this last comparison, this poor Perl codebase doesn't deserve such a stigmatization as to low it down at the level of systematic failure constructed by several generations of incompetent wannabe elite of the country regardless of continuous demonstration of total inability to take a single decision that make sense in regard to the goals of the mandate they are supposed to fulfill.
At least no one can pretend that Larry was missing the skills to handle the job, Perl community neither laked dedication on par with the flowing resources, and what they build still make stand a significant part of the internet diligently.
When looking at how wealthy democracies integrate immigrants the English speaking countries are dramatically more successful across all the standard objective metrics like crime rates or income compared to the native population. So Sweden isn't relevant.
Is the UK that particularly better than all the countries on the continent? And comparing US/Australia/NZ with Europe in the regard isn't exactly fair (they are much better at controlling and picking who can or can't come).
US specifically already has extremely high crimes rates (compared to most developed countries) which might overshadow any effect immigrants might have.
The US has very weak employment checks and it's trivial to illegally work ones life here without having to commit any other crimes.
We also have weaker regulations that allow you to start a business with basically $20 and a pressure washer, and you can legalize it with a foreign passport. The English speaking countries generally have lowest barriers to start a business which is a good release valve when you can produce value but racists won't hire you (customers will at low enough price).
I suspect illegals and foreigners in general don't cause so many problems here because its easier to survive helping us than hurting us.
I agree there's near infinite confounding factors. But I think the correlation is striking enough that it's relevant to this conversation especially considering that the post I'm replying to cites only non-Anglosphere countries.
This isn't adjusted by immigrant education/background though?
e.g. in the UK a slightly higher proportion of foreign born residents have tertiary degrees, in France it's the opposite (especially if we look at Île-de-France).
Australia especially is extremely picky (e.g. 60% (immigrants) vs 40%(native))
And I assume there might be other significant cultural/class/etc. differences. e.g. in the US 53% of all Arab-Americans are Christian. I can't quickly find any statistics but I assume in Europe the ratio is very different. Not saying that this specific example necessarily has an impact but differences in other characteristics might.
Generally English speaking countries tend to have and advantage at attracting highly educated/productive immigrants presumably both due to language and other cultural, economic and social factors. It's not at all surprising that their children do a better than average.
You may throw a Godwin point as introduction, it doesn't change the fact that some groups indeed doesn't integrate well into France. And this is despite billions of welfare money given for housing, free education, free access to health, etc.
You mentioned Gypsies, well I read scholarly work stating that they were warmly welcomed 4 centuries ago in the towns of my region, until people discovered a tendency of their purses to disappear. Yes, the same exact complains that some French have nowadays. At some point facts are facts, and victimization doesn't work. For the record, a lot of other nationalities blended without issues within two generations (Portugese, Polonese, Vietnamese, etc.)
Everywhere in Europe that welcomed Jews, their neighbors attacked them whenever the Plague came around, blaming them for poisoning wells. To be blunt, if that hadn't happened, the Jews would have probably disappeared into the general European population by the 15th Century. So you are supporting the point that village rumors led to a situation of permanent exclusion for Gypsies.
> To be blunt, if that hadn't happened, the Jews would have probably disappeared into the general European population by the 15th Century
That seems like a bizarre claim... If anything the attacks, discrimination etc. would have encouraged assimilation. Voluntary conversion to Christianity wasn't particularly uncommon either (forced violent conversion also occurred). Even when national governments started expelling their entire Jewish populations staying and getting to keep all of your property ussually was an option. Yet most chose to leave rather than convert.
Yes, converted Jews might have faced discrimination and even violence (this depended a lot on the willingness to abandon your old customs and practices and varied hugely based on time and place, but seemingly became a bigger issue at the very end of the middle ages) but ussually they managed to more or less fully assimilate in a few generations.
I see where you're coming from, because it sounds logical to someone who isn't part of an oppressed minority. But for the past 2500 years, religious Jews have felt threatened by the real possibility that less religious Jews would succumb to the easy life of assimilation that came with Helenization, Romanization, Germanization, etc. There is indeed a core that won't succumb to conversion in exchange for a place in the prevailing society, which is why Jews still exist in societies that have made it the slightest bit difficult for Jews to integrate.
But contrast that with, for instance, Kaifeng[0]. The biggest fear of Jewish believers is that they will encounter a society like America or China which swallows their talents whole and integrates them fully.
Put another way, it is a fear right now in segments of the Jewish community that without antisemitism, Jews would cease to exist. And there is a truth to this borne out by history. In Jewish communities it is practically taken for granted that if we had been treated equally, most of us would have given up our identity ages ago.
Have you considered that perhaps if the idea of integration itself is considered abhorrent by a culture then that culture will very rarely be accepted anywhere?
Or to put it another way: if everywhere one goes smells like feces, maybe one should check their own boots
They want the benefits of being part of the community without being part of the community
I am making the point - and I'm not the first to make it - that the lack of acceptance is the driver. From the outside of an ostracized community, it might make sense that people would choose to quit that community to avoid ostracization. Some few do. But the majority will cling more tightly together as a result of the external pressure.
For an example, take a look at the history of the Cagots in France, who were (are) ethnically identical to other French but due to their psychological treatment and ostracizatìon were forced into tight communities for survival.
This can happen to any arbitrary group of people sufficiently singled out for any reason. A similar case exists in Japan. Then if that group remains together for fear of the abuse they receive, the broader population says "they want to be separate".
Also, your shit on boots metaphor is highly offensive, but I'm answering you as if you aren't a bigot. Sometimes the reason people end up as bigots is that no one treated them with respect and gave them complete answers.
Cagots didn't really have an option of assimilating besides moving to a different region, that's what was special about them. Jews on the other hand ussually would do reasonably fine after converting. Of course it varied a lot by location/period and belonging to a group or a specific community was very important in premodern societies. You'd lose your entire support network and while you might be lucky enough to live in a place were other Christians wouldn't be throwing rocks at you you'll probably never be fully accepted (your grandchildren etc. might).
It's not inversion, but not going for a root cause far enough. You are of course right. Jews were not allowed to pursue most/all "honorable" professions.
Jews were merchants engaging in transactional relationships with farmers, which in an agragian society instills a level of hatred due to being fundamentally opposite to the reciprocal relations that farming neighbours participate in.
Jews were not allowed to own land or engage in trades. What they did have was an ethnic/family presence across national boundaries, which placed a few of them in a unique position to negotiate on behalf of their lords and kings. This led to a condition where a small fraction of Jews became essential to European diplomacy, and subsequently became movers of money. That plus the Christian ban on moneylending and the need for liquidity nonetheless.
Those wealthy "court Jews" largely converted to Christianity and assimilated, leaving their poorer brethren to die in pogroms and the Holocaust, while serving as the proof of blame for Jewish conspiracy at the same time.
I only learned recently about usury and the relationship with Jewish groups and their own history. The interplay between local powers needing money at different periods... It was all very fascinating. Especially how simple moral principles (lending for interests) could ripple so far.
Funnily enough it's not even that hard to 'become aware'. Start with the Wikipedia page on the Second World War, for instance, for a blockbuster entry to the topic.
The single most marginalised group of people in the West since antiquity have been the Jews (with the Romani a close second). Pretty much every European power has evicted, massacred, initiated pogroms, or otherwise persecuted Jews. The trend continues today.
Anyone who says 'anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism' is antisemitic, because that's denying a group of people their homeland or Urheimat. That is classic genocide, by the way.
> The single most marginalised group of people in the West since antiquity have been the Jews
Jewish people have generally been treated abominably for the last 2000 years, but surely he most marginalised groups don't even exist any more, because they were wiped out entirely.
> because that's denying a group of people their homeland
History is full of peoples who left or were kicked out of some original homeland. Jewish people are not special in that regard. My ancestors left Saxony about 1500 years ago to conquer an island, and kicked the inhabitants out to the periphery. That's more recent than the expulsion of the Jews 2000 years ago.
I think Israel should exist in the sense that it already exists so let's favour the status quo. But clearly we've learned that it's a completely stupid way to found new countries. Let's not make more ethnostates in other random parts of the world where people already live. We tried it, it turned out that it makes a mess.
Your last sentence makes no sense. Not every Jew identifies as Israeli and by claiming that Israel represents all Jews on this planet you are taking away their agency.
Think about how stupid what you wrote is in the context of a hypothetical second Jewish country that also claims to represent all Jews.
It is as crackpot as saying Switzerland, Austria and Germany all represent all Germans.
They didn't say that one country represents all Jews, they said Jews have a right to their homeland. You made the point that Germans have 3 homelands, and really I suppose you could add Alsace and the Sudetenland and Gdansk and some bits of Denmark if you were ambitious about creating more living space. Does the existence of any of those take away from the agency of people who identify as German?
Perhaps you mean that Germany and Austria have no right to exist, because Germanic tribes are just recent migrants there in the last 2000 years who came from the Urals or something? But wouldn't that be denying agency and stripping identity from the people who actually live there now?
The Germanic Urheimat is in North Germany / Southern Scandinavia, not the Urals, and separated from proto-Indo-European on the order of 4000 years ago, not 2000 years ago.
> But wouldn't that be denying agency and stripping identity from the people who actually live there now?
Indeed, that's why the founding of Israel was so problematic. Living somewhere 2000 years ago does not trump the rights of the people who lived there for the last 2000+ years. If we are to be consistent, Berlin must be returned to the West Slavs, London to the Celts, and so on... it's nonsense.
In the West we have (at least) started to acknowledge the crimes of colonialism and the various wars of conquest over the centuries. For us it is not existential, to acknowledge that what the British did during the slave trade is not existential. But for Israel it is, so many Israelis have to just pretend that the founding of Israel was perfectly just and fair, when it so obviously was an act of total lunacy when looked at through today's eyes. Please note, I do support the continued existence of Israel, because I favour the status quo, but its founding was an act of monumental stupidity.
That is not what I said; this is a strawman. I said, 'Jewish people deserve sovereignty over their ancestral homeland' (i.e. Zionism). This is completely orthogonal to 'Israel represents all Jewish people'.
That being said...
> It is as crackpot as saying Switzerland, Austria and Germany all represent all Germans.
I don't think that's crackpot at all. What's wrong with an ethnic state representing its people's and diaspora's interests? Why do you think countries today issue their citizens with passports? Why do some countries give even non-citizens a fast-track path to citizenship or at least an indefinite multiple-entry visa, provided they're of a certain ethnicity?
A plurality of countries today are ethnic states, by the way, including essentially every European state. I am very happy to say that the German-speaking part of Switzerland, Austria, and Germany absolutely represent Germans as a whole.
As an addendum: printed on the inside front cover of my A1 German textbook was a map of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Make of that what you will.
So many people would have "rights to their ancestral homeland" then.... History is full of conquest and expulsions and genocide. Arabs and Celts were both driven out of what is now my country, at points over a millennium ago. Shall their descendents be entitled to claim part of it as an ethnostate for themselves? Of course not, for that would be ridiculous.
Having colonial powers create an state in a place where people already lived, and which did not consent to its creation, was a terrible terrible idea that led to tremendous suffering a loss of life over the past 75 years. Acknowledging this is not antisemitic.
a (French) collective of Jews who oppose Zionism on anti-colonial grounds. I don't personally agree with them (my own views are more accurately summed up here:
https://arielche.net/Lydie.html
)
but I do think that it is possible to have a logically coherent worldview that says "Jews are to be respected and treated like any other human, but the state of Israel should not exist".
Personally, I don't believe that, I believe the state of Israel should exists, although I believe that bombing your neighbors is actually a piss-poor approach to national security, and honestly buying off the Palestinians by building them schools and hospitals is a lot cheaper in the long run than killing them with expensive jet fighters, but I don't go around accusing every anti-Zionist of anti-semitism.
I know some anti-Zionists personally, and they're what I'd call humanist, who believe the basic idea that, to quote Jefferson, "all men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,... life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".
The opposite. Money lenders were non-christians, because Christians were forbidden from charging interest. It is also easier to excommunicate a money lender if they aren't a fellow Christian, so the arrangement was actually to the benefit of Christians.
What you are doing is "affirming the consequent". Most Jews were working normal jobs (obviously excluding the ones they were legally barred) like everyone else.
not all jews though. Most of them were, I believe, middle class workers. You can see that from the meaning of their last names in the places they originate from.
Sorry but I don't even need rumors about gypsies, as a kid some were schooled during months of winter, and they were .. surprisingly creative when it comes to harming you (and I'm being polite here). I know gypsy culture is also bringing beautiful music, and some are hard working people touring the country during the summer, but really you don't need to go far to have evidence of issues still existing to this day.
If you did, then you would know that it is not about race, it is about culture. Gypsy culture is extremely toxic and more akin to gangs than to normal society.
Do you like violent drug gangs? If not, why? Are you racist to them?
I'm saying it was an anonymous story, lacking verifiable detail, spread in a public forum. Whether it's your personal truth or not is irrelevant to the fact that it's a rumor by definition.
Are you scared of definitions? Do you feel like dictionaries are written to gaslight you? Don't blow it out of proportion.
> And this is despite billions of welfare money given for housing, free education, free access to health, etc.
This assumes those things help one integrate. The Unites States notably doesn't have these things to the same degree that countries in Europe do. This means immigrants in America need to work. And work is a strong forcing function for socialization and integration.
> You mentioned Gypsies, well I read scholarly work stating that they were warmly welcomed 4 centuries ago in the towns of my region, until people discovered a tendency of their purses to disappear.
America also just have way fewer refugees. Seems like it's around 60k a year, so less than 0.02% of the population per year. Sweden, for example, has had around 26k refugees per year (the last 10 years), which is around 0.2% of its population. At its peak Sweden almost took on a full 1% in one year.
Of course it's easier to integrate a magnitude fewer refugees, and there will be less issues overall.
The illegal migrants coming to the US know they have to work if they wish to eat. Meanwhile, coming to Sweden has been just a ticket to easy life, where you get free housing and money, but will be probably excluded from the job market unless you learn the language and get several years of education.
So, in practice the two phenomena are very different.
It sounds from your comment that you are from Europe, but if you visit the US, you should travel to the south, find some white conservatives, and discuss black people. They will make astonishingly similar points to the ones you brought up, you'll find you and they have a lot in common.
For what it's worth, I'm a nonwhite immigrant living in a Deep South state, with experience living in more liberal coastal metropolitan areas. You will find that whites and blacks are much better integrated with each other in the south, and that racism runs deeper up north. For example, it's widely known among black professional athletes that the most racist city to play in is Boston.
> scholarly work stating that they were warmly welcomed 4 centuries ago
Yeah, that doesn't sound legit. Any general sentiment from that time period is lost, and the best your scholar can do is project the lens of the present onto sources from the past. To be fair, all histories are done that way.
That's not true. The best scholars can do is figure out the lens the past sources were using, given the historical record about the time period. Take for example contemporary scholarship and the historical Jesus. It's now understood Jesus was a 2nd Temple apocalyptic Jew. Something nobody is today, since 2nd Temple Judaism and it's sects were replaced by Rabbinic Judaism, and Christianity went in it's own direction.
> It's a relevant question. You are blaming it on the particular group of migrants involved in the case of Europe right now. But historically Europe has ghettoized other groups.
My understanding is that pre-WW2 Europe you had community groups that dealt with their people. So in a Jewish neighborhood, you had powerful Rabbis or other religious leaders that dole out law. These unofficial community leaders were given a lot of autonomy as to how to deal with their subjects. You see hints of that today in Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn where you have un-offical private police [0]. I don't think its as simple as saying they were excluded or ghettoized.
But that begs the question, what does it mean to be a country? Some people think its just magical land, like you step onto the country, get a piece of paper that says you're from that country and that's it. I think every country has a cultural identity. Much less so for America, since its the only country I know of where you can call yourself American despite not being born there or have any blood relatives from there but no one would bat an eye. But even there, some things are anti-American. Things like women being second class citizens (e.g. women can't drive or are forced to cover up). Or lawlessness (e.g. riding illegal scooters the wrong way down the street).
I think its perfectly reasonable to say that if you don't accept a countries values, you should not be allowed to move there. If you want to treat women like second class citizens or don't have respect for private policy or rule of law, you shouldn't be allowed to come to law abiding Western country.
>> if you don't accept a countries values, you should not be allowed to move there
But in the positive version, I think in America it is much easier to integrate if you do accept American values than it is in some European countries. And this is because, as you alluded, the only thing that makes America a unified country is a social agreement to certain shared values like rule of law, property rights, freedom to conduct business, freedom of religion, and more recently civil rights. Whereas those ideals are only recently tacked on to (most) European nations, and are not core to their identity; one can accept all those values and still never become German, for instance. Even France where many of those values originated has an ethnic nationalist core which denies integration to those who are not ethnically French. So what I mean is, accepting values in Europe is a start, but it is not enough.
And what we see in ghettoized cultures around the world, from African Americans to Algerians in France, is that the ghetto creates its own logic of rejecting the norms of the society which has rejected it. Welfare is not a substitute for a path toward individual success and acceptance in society; this is perhaps Europe's greatest mistake. On welfare, in the suburbs, who will believe and not mock the supposed values of equality and fraternity? It becomes a generational problem.
> Even France where many of those values originated has an ethnic nationalist core which denies integration to those who are not ethnically French.
disagree with this as a French person.
That "ethnic nationalist core" is the French equivalent of Trump supporters who say "America is a white (anglo) Christian nation".
the country currently known as France was originally Celtic Gaul, which was then conquered by Romans, then by various Germanic tribes, most notably the Franks who gave the country it's current name, and didn't really unify until fairly late. Even to this day, you'll find people in Brittany identify more as 'Breton' then French sometimes, despite the efforts of the French state to kill that local identity in the late 19th century. We're a nation of bastards, and always have been.
You'll have sad, sorry people on the far right who conjure up some imaginary ideal of a "true, ethnic French character", but it's like the KKK members in America talking about being 'true Americans'. It's a fallacy.
The people with high levels of melanin with parents that arrived in the country less than 50 years ago playing for our national soccer team are, at least to my mind, just as French as my father whose family lived around Saint-Etienne for the past 300+ years, even if some of them act like the equivalent of "that girl from Jersey shore saying she's Italian because her last name is Spaghetti despite not actually speaking a word of Italian and having never been there" sometimes. :)
I think it’s true that people in Europe feel that welfare is part of the problem here. In the Netherlands for example, one of the main right wing talking point is that refugees are given free social housing which could have gone to locals that are often on waiting lists for years.
In America on the other hand, land was forcibly taken from the natives by colonists centuries ago. Now, if you’re looking to move to the US, you can expect to work in poverty for a few generations as a second class citizen because that’s just how the “completely fair” capitalist system is set up. Forgetting for a moment that most capital is held by a single ethnicity, and they’re definitely not going to give it away for free.
Er...
speaking as a liberal American, this is a wild oversimplification. Housing is not a zero-sum resource. For one thing, to be a bit cheeky, when the white settlers stole the land from the Indians there was absolutely no housing at all. When my grandparents arrived in the US in the 1920s they lived in a tenement with one bathroom per floor. My grandfather saved his money as a tailor and a bartender and eventually built modern apartment buildings. If you harness the ingenuity and resourcefulness of immigrants they will build!
This is why I think welfare states in Europe are on the wrong path toward trying to integrate foreign populations, not because it takes resources away from native Europeans (the demand side) but because it chokes off the supply side of what immigrants should expect to need to add and contribute to the society.
I agreed with most of what you posted, but you have a misconception about these "welfare states". The immigrants end up on welfare because they are not allowed to participate in the economy. Why? Partly because of bureaucracy, and partly, one might say also because of other reasons: protectionism, discrimination, ...etc.
I think we're saying very much the same thing. Welfare to immigrants in Europe has become a tool to compensate for other elements which make finding work or gaining advancement difficult; so it is a subsidy meant to protect "native" jobs by isolating the foreign labor force. It serves a double purpose to prevent the integration of new arrivals. Worst of all, it attracts people who think they don't need to work. All of these things can be true at the same time.
<< Now, if you’re looking to move to the US, you can expect to work in poverty for a few generations as a second class citizen because that’s just how the “completely fair” capitalist system is set up.
Uh. I want to hope that this is just a oversimplification intended to get a reaction.
Yes, US does have real issues that it needs to address those in order to make social mobility reasonably attainable. Arguably, it is a lot harder to "make it" now.
I am just an anecdote here, but, I am a first generation immigrant. I have a house, a dog and a partner. Also next week, I am taking my vacation and buying a vette ( well, I scheduled a test drive -- didn't mentally commit to buying yet ). I do not consider myself a second class citizen. I am not rich, but I can't say I am poor either. My kid is starting school ( private, public one is not great here -- ok, but not great ).
I honestly do not think I would have been able to do the same in the old country.
I absolutely accept that I might not be the norm and the current version of capitalism needs to be reined in, but, honestly, if you do want to drive that point, I think you need a better argument.
That index is confounded by wage compression, which is high in Nordic countries and almost non-existent in the US, and small countries with limited economic diversity. Importantly, "social mobility" is only weakly related to the ease with which you can materially improve your economic situation, which is what most immigrants are after.
I don't think it is controversial at all to say that the US has much higher economic mobility than Europe.
If only. The Nordic countries solve the problem with a very easy trick: They’ve lowered the ceiling by a tremendous amount!
There’s a reason people do their startups in the US, there’s a reason the smart Nords move to the US rather than the other way around.
There’s a reason Y Combinator is American.
I encourage you to try innovating in Europe (or just the Nordic countries). Please prove me wrong, for the sake of Europe.
To be fair, it’s certainly not _impossible_ to move up, but it’s relatively much harder, which is the point.
eh... Germany, Netherlands, even France... Switzerland probably... all those places you'll have bright young hardworking people from Spain or Portugal or Tunisia moving there, getting tech jobs, and finding financial/material success. In many cases becoming citizens so their kids can have access to that life without jumping through a bunch of hoops for visas.
America is totally a place where a hardworking, intelligent immigrant can become fairly wealthy (assuming no catastrophic bad luck, ie. getting shot because the second amendment says that everyone should have a full-auto assault rifle), but it does not have a monopoly on that :)
Just a note on your gun death comment. The chance of dying by a gun in the US is very small. Of those killed by guns in the US, less than 3% are killed by anything resembling an "assault rifle". Over half of all gun deaths are suicides, so even those numbers are inflated if what you want to know is "how worried do I need to be about dying because the 2nd amendment allows assault rifle ownership?"
It's not the case in Germany, to get into a management role you generally need to be German. Also, the housing market is completely broken with all the good stock in the hands of white German boomers on old rental contracts paying a 1/3 what immigrants pay.
Germany is not a land of opportunity, it is a land of relative comfort, with laws and regulations in place to protect the lives of German boomers. Immigrants will never go far in Germany, but they will be relatively comfortable.
> I think its perfectly reasonable to say that if you don't accept a countries values, you should not be allowed to move there.
If we are still talking about France, then this is a country that 10 years ago saw big groups loudly oppose same-sex marriage, and who now oppose assisted reproduction. The (black female) minister carrying the law was subject to vile racist and sexist caricatures and mockery. France is a country whose president characterised the denunciations of sexual abuse by a famous actor as a man hunt. More recently still, an "expert" was heard on a widely watched TV network blaming the victims of rape for the reduction of births in the west. The same TV network that had to apologise a few months ago for claiming that abortion is the leading cause of deaths in the world.
The common point between all of these? They were all people of long term French descent. Not recent immigrants. There is no accepted "country's values" to begin with. There are laws, which are enforced and which immigrants and natives alike are expected to obey.
Now since you are talking about America, there are plenty of Americans, descendants of Americans for generations, who oppose abortion, to the point where it's all but illegal in several states. The past and likely future president is a rapist who bragged about it. There are no universally shared values among the American people around the rights of women either, and that's true even if we don't count immigrants as "true" Americans, whatever that may mean. America is a country which until very recently had segregation laws, and the "values" these laws represented didn't suddenly disappear when these laws were repelled.
Before claiming that immigrants should be accepting a country's values there should be some clarity around what those values are. Then someone should decide what to do with the people in the country who don't share those values. Political regimes that implement such "values"-based systems have a name: fascism.
I agree that regimes or groups that determine citizenship along the lines of vague "values" are always fascist or authoritarian, but that's why I delineated the "values" I was talking about and restricted them to the same ones embodied by the French Republic. In responding to the case I was trying to differentiate between those vagueries of ethnic background or shared religious "morals", and the few common things enshrined in our Constitution which most Americans would agree on and which virtually all asylum-seekers are seeking as the prerequisites to individual liberty and prosperity for their families.
So I suspect but won't condemn the parent poster of conflating "values" with a blood/soil/religious code, but that is not what I meant talking about American values, which are applicable to all comers without surrendering one's belief system. In theory, French values should be the same. Jefferson thought so. And in practice, as you point out, there is a deep well of nativists in both countries who believe they possess some further mystic undefined value system which excludes this or that foreign practice. But as you say the law is enforced and the state is preeminent; the difference being that this simple equality under law is what people come to America to seek, with some conviction that they can become American while fusing those liberties to the elements of their culture that they wish to maintain.
It is ironic that you would speak of a country's values, especially in the context of the USA, where many people that consider each other Americans don't even accept each other's values
Many Gypsies do integrate, and soon they are no longer Gypsies. The ones that remain are the descendants of generation after generation that chose again and again not to integrate. See also the Irish Travellers, an ethnically unrelated group with a similar culture.
Jews only got full citizenship rights in many European countries after the Enlightenment and in many ways their assimilation was absolutely a success, despite an enduring legacy of anti-Semitism (which was shown e.g. by the Dreyfus affair in France, not merely in places with a lengthy history of social authoritarianism and anti-Enlightenment values such as pre-1945 Germany). This, if anything, is proof that successful social integration can in fact be achieved in Europe - that "ethnic character" is not fixed in stone and can shift in response to incentives, at least over multi-generational timescales.
The path from Jewish emancipation in law to Jewish integration in practice was slowed and stymied by antisemitism at every turn, to greater and lesser degrees in different countries. It is hard to believe that Jews were ever regarded as true equals, broadly, in a country which willingly handed over so many to the Nazis. And of course in Spain, Jews were not full citizens and the practice of Judaism was simply forbidden entirely until 1978.
No. The revocation of that law from the Reconquista didn't change anything immediately. Jewish residents, some of whom were the descendents of those who had been there since Roman and even Phoenecian times, were not recognized as full citizens in modern Spain until 1978.
the people who “handed over so many to the nazis” - what makes you think they wouldn’t or didn’t gladly hand over non-jews if the regime demanded it?
your point about judaism being forbidden in spain until 1978 is shocking, thank you for that.
I would strongly recommend the following essay, which I read in an ethics class and found extremely powerful. The essay argues that humans can relatively easily be persuaded or intimidated into helping murder other humans, as long as they are introduced to it in the “correct” way. So we should understand what that way is and be vigilant against it.
Destroying the innocent with a clear conscience: A sociopsychology of the Holocaust
John P Sabini, Maury Silver
Survivors, victims, and perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust, 329-358, 1980
It may interest you that private confession of Islam was legal under Franco, but public practice of Islam, or the building of mosques, was banned in Spain until 1989. All of this goes back to the Reconquista and the Inquisition in the late 1400s, when Muslims and Jews were forced to convert, synagogues and mosques were repurposed as churches (and not coincidentally, ham became the national dish). Franco's version of fascism was merely a continuation of that.
That being said, you can't practice Christianity or Judaism openly in Saudi Arabia to this day. Looking at it from Mecca, the point of origin of the Caliphates, to their furthest extent into Europe in Spain (or the Balkans) you can still see the traces of extremist religious bans existing on both sides. Jews tend to get caught in the middle and slaughtered at each turn, as they need to seek accommodations with whichever larger religion is in power in order to survive, and then are seen as enemies by the other one.
All this is written on the streets and buildings of Granada, Spain, where ancient Jewish stars adorn old buildings where there are no Jews, where the oldest church was once a mosque, and the Alhambra, symbol of the Caliphate and its civilization, is the largest tourist attraction in Europe... where the markets sell everything Arabic yet the day to day interaction of Muslims and Christians is fraught, each understanding very well their own history in the place. And where it is very, very strange to be one of the only Jews... with both Christians and Muslims hating you and claiming to protect you.
> what makes you think they wouldn’t or didn’t gladly hand over non-jews if the regime demanded it?
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Would someone need to exclusively repress Jews for that repression to meaningfully affect Jews' economic and human rights trajectory?
the parent implies: difference in status of jews -> repression of jews
My point is that the status difference is not required for a regime to repress some group. It might make it easier, but not required.
>Destroying the innocent with a clear conscience: A sociopsychology of the Holocaust
That sounds as a very weak perspective to start with. That is, what if "they" are not "innocent"? There is definitely a standard out there that will allow to judge us as guilty of some heretic behavior, whoever we are.
Surely it would not be very wise to judge a book by its title, though.
indeed, would love your thoughts on the essay itself - iirc the title refers to a situation where a Nazi camp guard writes in their diary of a “special action” (which refers to the burning alive of prisoners) followed by a description of the soup that was served that day - the title seems appropriate to that situation at least. tbh its been a long time since I read it, so I may have got some minor details wrong. and I agree with your point about defining the victims as “guilty” might be part of the process. But the point of the essay seemed to be that almost no-one was making a considered moral judgement that what they were doing was correct, they were doing what they were told and had essentially “outsourced” their moral responsibility to the regime.
>One might ask: Was that the Jews' fault? Or the host society's fault?
I will speak from the perspective of one who emigrated to the US.
Every new group is initially seen as "the other". After some point, however, employers that hire "the other" may find that they can pay them less because there is less demand to hire them, and thus benefit financially, they hire more. As other employers follow suit, over time the salaries go up until they match that of other groups.
Their children benefit. The first generation of manual laborers and farmworkers begets the second generation of policemen, nurses, and soldiers begets the third generation of doctors and lawyers and professors.
In the US this has happened to Irish, Italians, Germans, Russians, Jews, East Asians, Indians, and Latinos. Why hasn't this happened to blacks (or has happened in substantially less numbers), despite the latter having the benefit of US citizenship and command of the English language from birth? Why hasn't this happened to the Somalians mentioned elsewhere? The Muslims of Dearborn?
Or look at Britain, where you have three groups from the Indian subcontinent:
* Indian Hindus
* Indian Sikhs
* Indian and Pakistani Muslims
Sikhs and Hindus have been very successful; they are more likely than the average to be part of the British middle class <http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/14/middle-britain-...>. Muslims are, by contrast, worse than average in every single social measure despite being, racially speaking, indistinguishable from the other two groups to any outsider (since none knows, or cares, about the myriad of caste differences); they are all "Asians" in Britain. But the outcomes are completely different.
I will ask you the same question you posed. Are these differences in outcome the groups' fault? Or the host society's fault?
The US has extended the protection of the law to the law-abiding Irish, Italians, Germans, Russians, Jews, East Asians, Indians, and Latinos freeing them up to flourish and build human capital. By contrast, the same state has not only failed to do so for the Black community, but its agents have engaged in extrajudicial killings of the community's members with impunity since they lost their legal "protection" as someone else's private property.
Community under assault will redirect its private efforts to security which then undermines cultural and economic development and slows down formation of human capital. That's because security needs are fundamental and trump cultural and economic development [1].
Regarding Indian Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, I disagree they are indistinguishable for outsiders. Typically, anybody who cares can tell by the name, place where they live, or even just the job they do.
> Regarding Indian Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, I disagree they are indistinguishable for outsiders. Typically, anybody who cares can tell by the name, place where they live, or even just the job they do.
It is only recently that some white Brits may have started clueing on to this. While these trends were emerging, this was definitely not the case.
And even now, it very often is not the case. To give an example, plenty of Brits from Pakistani muslim backgrounds have names and surnames that <1% of white Brits could place as being of that background. This isn't rare at all, unlike e.g. Arab names that indeed most can tell apart.
It's most significant, though, that you even say "Brits from Pakistani muslim backgrounds". No one says "French from Algerian muslim backgrounds". A French person with an Algerian background can only be a descendant of one of the million or so ethnic French who colonized Algeria, and is in no case a Muslim. The UK is far ahead of the continent in terms of integration, and the US is light years ahead of that.
I'm not unsympathetic to the idea that mainstream Islam, since then 1970s, has morphed into something closer to extreme ultraorthodox Judaism or an extreme branch of Christianity. And this is certainly an obstacle to integration. But it is not irreversible, and I think in particular rejection by a foreign host culture serves to reinforce that extremism. North Korean defectors have a lot of trouble assimilating in South Korea, despite speaking the same language. Their hard drives are formatted differently, their software is different. The goal of a host society should be to study where the differences present themselves acutely and how to alleviate the pain and rejection of individual emigrants without accepting extremism or compromising the values of the culture into which they have immigrated. This means teaching individualism and the importance of education and self sufficiency rather than doling out welfare subsistence, but it also means the mainstream culture must actively try to embrace the individuals who wish to become part of mainstream society. Europe fails in both.
W/r/t the failure of the US toward Black people, I completely agree with the sibling comment by user:avz and would have nothing more to add.
>The goal of a host society should be to study where the differences present themselves acutely and how to alleviate the pain and rejection of individual emigrants without accepting extremism or compromising the values of the culture into which they have immigrated.
Doesn't that presuppose the conclusion? That such emigrants should be received regardless of how fundamentally different their hard drives' formatting is? Why should that be?
If South Korea did not have strong familial and ethnic ties with North Koreans, it would never accept any NK defectors at all, and said differences in software would a big reason why. Heck, one can imagine the South putting up walls to prevent a large-scale influx of North Koreans after the Pyongyang regime collapses.
I like this coding analogy. Would they willingly accept 20 million people with bizarre and incompatible software? Yes but barely because it's in the same language? China has even less desire for the NK regime to fall, as the formatting and language would disrupt the balance in Manchuria.
But I'm not talking about what they want (whatever South Korea says they want about reunification). I mean what preparations are they making for absorbing that mass of people in the event that it happens... in particular, turning them from a faceless mass into prosperous and contributing individual members of a modern westernized society. South Korea has put a lot of study into that question, as did West Germany. So why can't France? They did control a good portion of the Muslim world for a couple of centuries, after all. What's the difference between the potential collapse of Algeria and the collapse of NK, or at least what is the plan for it?
No one wanted civil wars in Syria and Libya that would send millions of refugees to Europe, but there has been no systematic approach to integrating them and, let's say, updating their software. The prevailing view seems to be that this is temporary rather than just a fraction of what is to come. Anyone looking at the demographics can see that if Europe fails to inculcate its Enlightenment values into its immigrant population within a generation, those values will cease to exist. So I mean what is the real plan?
I am not sure if this argument holds for France and its Muslim citizens. Historically, France didn't "control a good portion of the Muslim world for a couple of centuries."
They ruled Algeria for about 130 years, and Tunisia and Morocco for less than half that. Syria and Lebanon for a measly 26 years. That's barely a blip in historical terms. Plus some bits of West Africa with Muslim populations. That hardly counts as "a good portion of the Muslim world."
So it's rather decades here, not centuries. And more like "strategic chunks", instead of "good portion". Let's not conflate limited colonial holdings with some kind of vast Islamic empire under French rule.
Maybe I exaggerated. But France controlled essentially all of Muslim west Africa at one point or another, and France's former colonies are the overwhelming source of their immigrant population. Outside of Quebec, the Francophone world is largely Muslim and African. For that reason, the analogy should hold: The people flooding into France were former subjects and partial citizens. South Korea views all Koreans from the North as citizens and has a plan for their integration, just like Israel views all Jews from Ethiopia or Morrocco or France as citizens; and has plans to absorb them. What is France's plan?
Are we really grouping all black people in one group here? The only thing that matters is income in the US. A poor white and a poor black have a lot in common, and the reason why we tend to have poorer black vs whites is because of lasting damage from institutional racism over the last century that precluded many opportunities contemporary whites had to begin building generational wealth. It’s that simple. That being said, generational wealth among the black population has been building all this time. There are black communities today that have very high income levels and rates of homeownership.
>> the reason why we tend to have poorer black vs whites is because of lasting damage from institutional racism over the last century that precluded many opportunities contemporary whites had to begin building generational wealth
Yes. And even after the institutionalized racism was banned in various forms, the social system of racism continues to this day in the form of lower wages for the same jobs, less chance of hiring or buying a home with the same qualifications.
What I am saying is that this is the indigenous European attitude toward migrants, and it is creating generations of ghettoized people who no longer believe they can integrate, just as generations of Black people in America gave up on integration, seeing that they were still kept out on a daily basis even after having achieved legal equality.
> I've heard the same polite euphemisms refering to Arabs and Gypsies from the mouths of members of the Front National. You know, before 1945 it was said in Europe that Jews weren't able to integrate fully with the host society.
I my country Jews lived for 800 years until they left without saying Godbye in 1940s. But we have never held them hostage - they were free to move to Ottoman Empire or North Africa if that suited them better. Or behind Pale of Settlement.
Living in ghettoes, sitting shiva for members of community that married non-Jews or assimiliated, being under influence of fanatical rabbis didn't help with integration.
'Europe has a problem with integration that has its roots in the ethnic character of its states...'
In the UK we have large numbers of both Pakistani and Indian immigrants. One group has integrated mostly successfully in all walks of life and the other one has not.
Hard to argue that this has not been a consequence of choice although plenty of experts, who have never lived with 100 miles of these communities, tell us otherwise.
The Pakistani (most Pahari/Mirpuri) community was segregated in de facto ghettos and were brought to work unskilled manual labor jobs in a couple industrial estates in the 50s-70s.
When the UK began deindustrializing, they were extremely hard hit because the factories shut down.
Poverty and Northern England racism (BNP was normalized and doing hate crimes well into the early 2000s, schools were shite with grammar schools closing, etc) kept Mirpuris stuck in the ghetto.
And trust me - a Brown guy - when I say that tbe UK is miles more racist and passive aggressive to Desis compared to the US or Canada.
Why integrate in a country that keeps being passive aggressive and using your community as a scapegoat.
This is why my parents moved to North America instead of Europe in the 1990s - heck my dad had an offer to work for ARM plc in Cambridge back then around the initial IPO.
None of the doors I was able to open here in the US would have been opened if I were in the UK or Germany.
I'll get amazing schacenfreude when Labour finishes signing the FTA with India in a couple months and Rolls Royce and Dyson begin slowly moving operations.
None of the doors I was able to open here in the US would have been opened if I were in the UK or Germany...
The UK recently had a Prime Minister of Indian descent, that he was able to breakthrough the glass ceiling of racism is quite remarkable given he subsequently was unable to demonstrate a talent for anything.
> The UK recently had a Prime Minister of Indian descent
And the US had an African American President yet police brutality incidents still occur.
And that Prime Minister has anyhow left the UK and returned to California (a couple blocks from the Santa Monica Pier). Some GSB alums are setting up a VC Fund for that PM post-Downing Street as we speak.
Hell, his business career only started AFTER he immigrated to the US and then returned to the UK to work at TCM.
> he was able to breakthrough the glass ceiling
P
Money is the ultimate equalizer in a country as status obsessed as the UK.
Sunak attended an independent school which his parents were able to afford being specialists.
Grammar Schools were shut down in the 80s-90s and comprehensives continue to underperform independent schools in placing students in Russell Group programs.
If you're parents were working class, you statistically will remain working class.
Intergenerational Social Mobility remains lows in the UK [0][1][2][3], and add to that economic depression in the North+Midlands and the very real othering that happens in the UK and that has caused the Mirpuri community to remain economically deprived.
--------
In the US I never get asked where I'm from, or told that "my English is excellent", or after a couple pints with coworkers get told "you're one of the good ones". Yet I've faced this kinda BS ALL THE TIME whenever I'm in the UK for work. It's worse on the mainland.
Fundamentally, in the US I am not treated as a token nor do I face microagressions. In the UK or Mainland Europe I have to deal with both.
> You know, before 1945 it was said in Europe that Jews weren't able to integrate fully with the host society. One might ask: Was that the Jews' fault? Or the host society's fault?
Which Jews? Ultraorthodox don't integrate very well in Israel, for instance.
The tendency of a subsection of orthodox Jews from one area of Eastern Europe to self-ghettoize is something of a red herring. In Western Europe, Jews were never truly integrated unless they converted. And even those who converted and their mixed race children were ultimately slaughtered for their ethnic background, giving lie to the notion that even a WWI veteran ex-Jew could become German.
The Haredi (ultraorthodox) movement itself is a reaction to urban Jews who wished to assimilate when such a thing became conceivable in the 19th C. And this is a ghetto mentality. In American terms, your question would be equivalent to "which Black people?" Implying that people who claim and cling to ghetto culture have a hard time integrating. But that 1. dismisses the role that ghettoization had on creating a subculture in the first place, and then 2. pretends the subculture itself is the reason for failure to integrate, i.e. that it's the cause rather than the effect, and 3. serves to allow and excuse and justify the mainstream of society projecting their negative perceptions of that subculture onto individual members of the same ethnic group who would like to integrate without completely renouncing their unique heritage. And in the Jewish case, even complete renunciation wasn't enough, so perhaps the ghetto culture had a point.
> I don't think the evidence definitively supports the conclusion that it's down to which group.
I've lived besides Gypsy communities, and had during school Gypsy friends. Some were in the top of the class, and many were not. The big predictor for integration was not ethnicity but culture.
Some have a culture that indoctrinated them to exploit and explicitly not integrate with the general population. How would you integrate a culture that explicitly rejects integration without changing the culture itself?
> Some have a culture that indoctrinated them to exploit and explicitly not integrate with the general population.
Can we be more specific please?
I live in an European country and have not observed what you're describing here.
There are individuals and groups that have tendencies like you describe, but the generalization doesn't hold in my eyes.
I've had refugees in my family, inner circle, at workplaces and so on. The most general observation I can make is that people who tend to flee or migrate from authoritarian, politically oppressive places tend to be very appreciative of social democratic systems.
Specifically I meant some groups of Gypsies from Eastern Europe, where I've seen this behavior. Most immigrants don't fall in this pattern though, like you describe.
In Europe we have inmmigrants from all over the world, but consistently there's an area in a continent that shows up in crime stats way more than others. Can you explain that? Is that we are all xenophobic or racists or can we admit that there's a cultural component into it, because similar migrants within the same continent but different culture do actually do ok?
Other times may have different outcomes because countries and cultures change. Spain for example is a completely different country from what it was in the 80s, economically and culturally.
When you live in a place, and you see the same people showing up in stats, and people see the same behavior over and over and over and over, it's about time to quit calling people things and admit that something is going on and we should do things differently.
And if you don't then someone will show up promising to deal with it.
Personally I think it's less about accepting others, and more about the fact European economy sucks, has rigid job markets, and lacks entrepreneurial spirit. Historically people left Europe to the US, because that's where you could improve your life through hard work. Those Chinese-Americans improved their life by founding successful businesses, which doesn't seem to happen so much over here.
Obviously the US being a land of immigrants with most commonly spoken language in the world helps a lot too. The fact Europe isn't like the US doesn't make it xenophobic. Compared to pretty much anything except the US, it's still among the most accepting towards people of different cultures.
The economy sucks for everyone, not only a subset of poor migrants. A subset of african migrants show up in crime stats way more than plenty of other poor migrants coming from pretty much everywhere, be it asia, africa or latam.
Some poor indian has no advantage coming to Spain compared to someone from the Magreb, in fact we could argue quite the opposite as their support networks/country of origin are pretty far away.
>I don't think the evidence definitively supports the conclusion that it's down to which group. Europe has a problem with integration that has its roots in the ethnic character of its states (something America does not have), in deep-seated xenophobia that causes social exclusion of immigrant or out-groups, and in the fact that its states' reasons for existence are based on tribal boundaries and wars for territory rather than on achieving broader democratic and economic flourishing by harnessing the capability of the whole population. And thus Europe presents neither a dream of integration nor a path toward integration (as in, "to become American"; there is neither an equivalent aspiration nor option "to become French"). And then, once again, Europe blames the groups it refuses to accept.
Strongly agreed on most of these points.
The U.S. on the one hand, for all the accusations of racism leveled against it (sometimes rightly) is generally very accepting towards immigrants and integrates them with surprisingly little xenophobia after a while. The U.S. has been doing this for many generations across many different ethnic groups and almost universally, after a couple or more generations, they identify more as americans than as members of their culture of origin, by far. Historically there has been tension and racism throughout this process but it tends to fade and millions of people of many ethnicities join the American mainstream remarkably well.
Also, it helps that American society and culture are extremely charismatic in the eyes of much of the world in a way that powerfully encourages the desire to integrate among immigrants, and especially their kids.
Most European societies don't have either of the above traits nearly as much as the U.S.
No matter how many decades one lives in the Netherlands, one would never be seen as "Dutch". Whereas a Mexican living for 10 years in the USA and throwing BBQs in his backyard would be seen as 100% American.
That’s only part of the problem. The other part is the incompatible religious values of the immigrants. Not all of course. But at least enough to cause conflict with western liberal values.
I think there’s a term confusion here, jews generally integrated well wherever they went but what they didn’t do was assimilate in the larger population. They kept their own traditions over the ones in the countries they migrated to and continued to keep tightly knited communities, to the envy or suspiciton of the host countries.
> One might ask: Was that the Jews' fault? Or the host society's fault?
Or even ask, how much should they integrate? I'm in the UK. Jewish communities seem to have held on to a certain cohesion, and kept their traditions alive well past when the natives gave up on their own traditions and communities
This post is incorrect in quite a few parts. Being a visitor, albeit even longer term, doesn't make you an automatic expert nor give you that much understanding, this thing isn't a linear function of time spent. Even being married or integrating hard doesn't automatically cover deeper topics.
Not going to write novel about this complex topic but in US, if you fail career/financially wise, society lets you easily die homeless on streets, nobody really bats an eye and everybody is focused on 'american dream', chasing money and career. Not so much in Europe. This stressor for newcomers aligns people towards direction that is actually beneficial to native society, unless they fail and turn to highly punished crime. Here in Europe we are often benevolent with social help (sometimes too much I'd say), and abuse is not uncommon, especially with migrants since systems were often not designed with this in mind. Most people perform very differently if they have firm pressure on them from many/all directions vs not so much.
Also, absolutely nothing you write is relevant about ie Switzerland, which works a bit more like US in terms of those pressures and it shows on the ground.
The issue is easily 10 levels deeper and wider, no point drilling into all of that. But please refrain from reductionism and clearly very US-centric and confident view and judging of society you clearly don't understand that much.
I strongly recommend modiano's occupation Trilogy on this general subject (jews in europe) 2012 Nobel prize winner (year from memory but modiano (french) def got a Nobel in literature)
You may not know this, but the word Gypsy is considered an insult by the people you reference to. It's like the N-word for black people. The preferred name is Romani.
We Europeans love to look down upon America when it comes to stuff like functional government, bicycle paths and public services, but wrt immigration we’re so far behind the US, it’s not even funny.
> a path toward integration (as in, "to become American"; there is neither an equivalent aspiration nor option "to become French")
We really need to copy this vibe wholesale from the US (and Canada). That people can move here but even their grandchildren won’t feel that they’re properly French (or in my case, Dutch) is obscene.
I like your observation that the root cause is the ethnic character of our states but that doesn’t mean we can’t take a note or two out of the American playbook. Truth is we’re not even trying.
Instead we’re hopelessly split between the left who stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that there’s a problem (and calls you a racist when you try), and the right who want to hold onto some ethnic nation state pipedream that we never were and never will be.
One thing nearly every American agrees on is if you’re a citizen, you’re American. It’s actually an extremely welcoming and beautiful thing about this country.
The only reason you're thinking this way it's because you're thinking about problematic migrants, but there are many others you don't see. They don't need to become French, Spanish, Dutch, etc. They're perfectly fine feeling from $country in $eurocountry, going on with their lifes.
Europe is not the US, it can't be, and that doesn't mean we're at fault of everything. Many poor migrants come and do ok and have the same opportunities and challenges that others who fail.
But somehow is always the same subset we think about.
I attack the idea that someone born and raised in, say, NL whose grandparents moved in from, say, Turkey, is considered a Turk, often both by themselves and other people. In my opinion, if someone is born and raised here, they’re Dutch, or something like “Turkish-Dutch” maybe, but instead everybody talks about them like they are an immigrant.
To lock people inside their little immigrant identity groups, even when done out of some loving inclusive anti-racism vibe, has the adverse effect of what’s intended. It’s totally possible to be Dutch and Turkish and we should celebrate that, not fight it.
Noduerne, may I ask a question? I hope I do not offend you.
I know that million of white men died fighting against the Germans in WW2.
Why is it that 95% of what I hear from Jews is condemnation if white men for being NAZIs, when the majority of white men and the winning side fought against the Germans?
It seems like there should be a 60% gratitude to 40% condemnation split.
European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations
You as an American can move to France, and you'll never be considered French. Doesn't matter if you speak french every day for the rest of your life with the most perfect French accent the world has ever heard. And if you and your American wife have kids in France after living in France for 20 years, your kid isn't French either.. even if he lives there for another 80 years. Better hope your kid finds a french wife, or his kids won't be french either.
The idea that you move to a country and you're one of them is an American concept.
That is just not true. My grand parents migrated from Spain to France and my family perfectly assimilated. I never once in my life felt like anyone of us was not accepted as French.
Now I decided to myself live in Japan and I hear the very same speech as yours again and again about my host country. Yet my experience is very positive, I have integrated well and made my life here, and I never felt like I wasn't accepted.
But of course it took a lot of work to get there. Learning a new language, getting familiar with the local culture and embracing it is far from easy. The problem I see with some foreigners here is that they simply don't do this work and keep living in their own (often unhappy) bubble. Or even refuse to embrace some local customs because they are convinced that their own culture's way of doing things is superior to that.
I don't know why you think this: the French are explicit (and proud) of both their cultural chauvinism and their willingness to integrate those who fully assimilate into it. Assimilation is required, but it's also sufficient (in contrast with the US, where it's neither required nor sufficient).
> The idea that you move to a country and you're one of them is an American concept.
> You as an American can move to France, and you'll never be considered French. Doesn't matter if you speak french every day for the rest of your life
I wonder why you would think that. France is one of the few countries were it does work like this.
Unlike the US, in France it's not common to even ask where someone "comes from" if they speak French, most people will just assume you're French. After all, one of the current candidate Prime Ministers is half Vietnamese, and a former Prime Minister (somewhat candidate today as well I guess) was Spanish. But they are both as French as anyone else without question, because being French is not an exclusive identity (traditionally at least, but the rise of the extreme right these days is trying to change that).
it would be polite to act magnanimously in stating that America is not the only country with this behaviour, really I'm glad to see that the American god complex affects those across all walks of life
Of course you will have the French nationality, and of course we’ll consider you French! Don’t even need a French wife - I have many friends like this.
I might not consider you French if you scream “I hate France, vive l’Algérie” everyday, but a LOT of people will consider you French and, quote, “More French than the right-wing extremists”. Oh, the irony. You can say you hate France and all of the people in the center of Paris and Lyon will consider you are a good French.
> You may not be concerned about the crime, but many voters are.
So, if we're concerned about crime, let's create a set of laws where we can A) get the immigrants we need for demographic and workforce reasons, but B) where we can actually screen and be selective.
Plugging our ears and relying upon illegal migrants isn't going to result in good outcomes.
> It is not desirable to have separate ethnic groups who "share the same language, culture and faith" distinct from the mainstream.
The desirable place is somewhere in the middle. We benefit from distinct identities and varied culture, but we also need to reach enough of a common ground to pull as one nation and for two random people to be able to get along meaningfully.
A whole lot of joys that I experience in life come from the ways we're varied, but breaking into enclaves would prevent those joys and weaken us.
We tend to reach various kinds of overreactions. Respect for diversity is great, but not to the point to completely reject integration. The avoidance of appropriation-- avoiding adopting traditions of another culture without attribution or respect-- is important, but not to the extent that it prevents mixing or getting along.
> History and data from various European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations, and remain ghettoized with low employment and high crime rates (vastly higher, for certain categories of crime).
I'm not sure that's true. For example, in the United States, it took numerous generations of German-Americans to fully integrate into society, with towns in Wisconsin speaking a dialect of German well into the 1940s. Despite this lack of cultural integration, these cities experienced very little crime.
Different immigrant groups have better or worse outcomes, hence my saying "some immigrant groups". The cultural distance between the English progenitors of the US to the large wave of German immigrants in the 1800s is not as great as, say, that of Turkish immigrants to Germany post-WW2, or Syrian immigrants to contemporary Denmark.
Another way to look at it is that immigrant groups bring parts of their old world with them; German-Americans left a high-social-trust, low-crime culture and established it in their new country.
You can see this with Italian immigrants to America. I’m in New Jersey right now, and recently was in Wyoming. These are obviously not the same people despite being “white.” They’re more different than Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and we fought a war to be separate from each other.
> German-Americans left a high-social-trust, low-crime culture
Did they? I can't speak to the crime rate of the German empire, but a very common reason to immigrate, in addition to availability of farm land, was to avoid the draft (low social trust). The slow rate of assimilation is also a signal that these were not people coming from a "high-social-trust" background.
WWI also forced the issue in a way that hasn't quite applied to other "ethnic" folks in the US. German immigrants, by and large, have been pushed towards forgetting their national culture altogether and assimilating into a newly-manufactured (by early 20th-century Progressives, no less), unified "White" identity.
There was as much (more, even) pressure on the Italians and Irish to do the same.
But, to add to and enforce OP's point, their cultures were a larger schism away and they instead held on and entrenched their identities (to their objective detriment, no matter your moral stance). Meanwhile, Anglo, Franco, German, Dutch, etc cultures all kind of melded into the early "White American" identity; due to the general ease of assimilation.
How much difference is there, really, between various European nationalities? They are all white and Christian, using similar language and script, mostly the difference is in the Christian denomination.
Similar language is a stretch. Sure, European languages have similar roots, if you go enough far back. But the ability to speak your native language with a fellow European of another nationality, and have a fluent conversation, is quite limited.
>History and data from various European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations, and remain ghettoized with low employment and high crime rates (vastly higher than the native population, for certain categories of crime).
Twice as many Britons joined ISIS as served in the British military. <https://www.newsweek.com/twice-many-british-muslims-fighting...> The new ISIS members are not first-generation recent arrivals; they are the children and grandchildren of those who arrived decades ago.
Australia has a large number of ethnic groups, media and the far right claims similar issues.
Using statistics on the background of prisoners, in Australia, most non-white ethnic groups have lower representation in prison compared to their percentage of the population when compared to white Australians.
I wanted to verify the claim from your post/wikipedia link, as I don't believe it's true, but it's kind of a shame that wikipedia accepts a link to a 238 page report as the citation for a claim. It should at least refer to a specific page or section in the report. I don't want to hunt through hundreds of pages of this report to verify the claim. The report also doesn't have any sort of "conclusions" section so there's no quick way to even verify that the report is saying what they claim it's saying, let alone find the data behind the claim.
However, I did a quick search for every sentence containing the word Australia, and found nothing that seemed to back up the claim.
According to this statistic https://www.statista.com/statistics/1411761/australia-share-... Indigenous Australians are significantly overrepresented in the prison population. As of 2022, Indigenous Australians made up 31.8% of the prison population, despite constituting only about 3.3% of the total population. Because of this massive overrepresentation, it might well be that other non-white ethnic groups are underrepresented. It's statistic and doesn't tell why one minority ends up in jail so often.
This definitely wasn't true when I was researching during university (~2005). That was obviously a long time ago, so it's very plausible that things have changed. However, I'd want to see some very well-vetted data to believe it.
"African (predominantly South Sudanese) youth comprise at least 19 per cent of young people in custody despite being less than 0.5 per cent of Victoria's youth population."
I support immigration. I know a ton of university educated parents who either came here so or paid msrp price at American universities to get their education. And their kids all went to American universities. Through undergrad they got no free rides or scholarships either. They're smart and went to places like Emory or CMU.
But why is so damn hard to also solidly insist on an orderly border? The US is a proper country with borders. It cannot be if you shoot or sneak in you're served like the wilds of old western bar frontier living. That's not operationally effective.
I want both.
It's congress far, far, far more than any president that is responsible for taking a 0 on all this.
You have a wonderful skill at keeping the temperature down on hot issues. I know a simple upvote would suffice but I wanted to drop a compliment here regarding this talent of yours.
Interestingly various European nations turn out to be a poor comparison group for the United States. No one has conclusively determined why yet, but we know there's a strong correlation between a country having English as the primary language and immigrants integrating well.
This is especially true for second-generation immigrants. First generation immigrants are general less likely to commit crimes, but in countries like Germany and France the rate rises significantly with the second generation. That doesn't happen in the US or Canada, for example.
The children of immigrants in English speaking countries tend to do better financially than their parents whereas in many non-english speaking European countries the children of immigrants slide into poverty.
The UK has significantly better integration than the continent in line with the other Anglosphere countries.
I agree it's not enough evidence for anything conclusive. But I think it's enough evidence to say arguing about what will happen to the US based only on Sweden data is unsound.
> No one has conclusively determined why yet, but we know there's a strong correlation between a country having English as the primary language and immigrants integrating well.
To me this has a simple answer: (Western) countries with English as the primary language are all New World countries, with the obvious exception of the British Isles nations.
Ask immigrants or the children of immigrants (like me).
Western Europe are just extremely insular and passive aggressive and will gladly bury their head in the sand regarding their own racism.
Anglo countries at least tried to tackle racism by introducing education about racism (eg. Civil Rights Movement in US, Aboriginal Rights Movement in Australia, First Nation's Movement and racial quotas in Canada, the anti-Skinhead movement and the trade union lead anti-racism movement in the UK) and trying to build an identity that trascends race or ethnicity.
Similar movements happened in mainland Europe as well, but aren't taught about, so mainland Europeans remain insular in their mindset.
Ukrainians integrating into Polish culture is similar to the East and West German unification post wall, only more complicated by a few extra generations...
> History and data from various European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations, and remain ghettoized with low employment and high crime rates (vastly higher than the native population, for certain categories of crime).
Does it suggest that, though? It suggests that, in the specific conditions that were presented to those groups, they turned to crime. However, we can't pretend that the previous generations of immigrants had exclusively good experiences and quality of life, even in Europe. Obviously, some countries tried their best but in the past decades we had far less experience on proper integration (we as in the collective we, no country has worked out some perfect plan on it).
In fact, certain countries specifically created neighbourhoods (ghettos) for immigrant populations, all with positive intentions. Can't really blame the migrants for then becoming "ghettoized" in such a scenario. Granted, I know of other countries that specifically did not do that and still had struggles, which just goes to show how the whole thing is a minefield, where good intentions can clash with harsh reality.
Yeah, but it seems like some nations are only willing to invest a low amount of effort in it working out. I.e. if you're highly educated skilled worker who will integrate on their own, great. If you're a manual laborer who will do the work no one wants, for less money, pay tax and integrate their kids, great. But if the host society needs to invest in their education, social programs and integration, then screw it, let them ghettoise and hope the resulting jump in nationalism and animosity towards them will balance things out.
> It is not desirable to have separate ethnic groups who "share the same language, culture and faith" distinct from the mainstream.
Why not? Mainstreams are temporary. The Romans shifted from pagans to christians in just a decade (officially speaking). The German speaking region of Belgium was annexed in the 1900s (now the country has 3 different official languages). The whole latin america started speaking Spanish long before they became actual countries. Spain was mostly muslim for over 700 years.
There’s no mainstream. We are always changing and the mix is always better.
Not every culture can integrate, not every culture is a step "forward". Also, your examples are quite weak
1. Paganism was not doing too well by the time Christianity became official.
2. Belgium is a joke country (sorry!) that still has a divided population based on the language they speak. Hardly a success case.
3. Americans speaking Spanish also resulted in losing native languages and cultures. It might be okay to accept it, but the implications in your case are obvious, and it definitely would deserve a fair bit of debate whether we're okay with that.
4. Right, because the Reconquista was famously a period of peace and prosperity...
If these are the arguments FOR massive immigration then don't be surprised the vast majority of the public is against it.
I don’t know man. This idea of certain cultures being so distant that they cannot be integrated with others sounds a bit alien to me. If anything, we (all the different cultures in this planet) are the result of a vast amount of mixing over the centuries. We probably don’t notice it anymore (proof that the mix has worked wonders) and we think we all are so good because “our” culture, “our” values. I mean, if something so profound such as religion was literally imported to America, anything is possible. Sometimes I wish we were invaded by aliens 100% different from us in every aspect, so that we realised once and for all that we all humans just are and feel the same.
Even relatively harmless things like haram vs non-haram meats can cause a huge struggle, yet alone other more nuanced, complex cultural issues.
Also should we really be accepting of cultures that openly and unashamedly want to harm marginalized groups such as anyone who identifies as LGBT? Getting some new recipes or whatever (as it appears that's the direction you're thinking of) is one thing, having people decapitating school teachers [1] because of a drawing (which itself was based on a lie) is a whole different thing which nobody sane should be in support of in literally any context, ever.
this is the most holier-than-thou (literally and figuratively) broad strokes opinion phrased as if it's a nuanced opinion about cultures.
i think it's self-evident from history and society that "importing" "barbarism" into "society"* is how we even started doing things like not unashamedly harming marginalized groups in the West. if i'm not mistaken most christian sects, whether in europe or america have had various levels of being okay with ostracizing and harming queer and trans people until very recent times. your comment smacks incredibly of thinking only western white civilizations are capable of overcoming "barbarism" and evolving into a more just society for people over time, especially using the common scapegoat of other cultures taking longer to catch up on LGBT rights.
fascinating that other people's systems of being is "barbarism" and yours is "society". and thus, it's reasonable that most of the world thinks american society was barbaric with their deep rooted slavery and racism, and european society barbaric with their violent colonial extractionism defining much of their past and present.
> your comment smacks incredibly of thinking only western white civilizations are capable of overcoming "barbarism" and evolving into a more just society for people over time...
I'm neither a Westerner, nor am I (entirely) White (1/2 Serbian, if you count it as white (you'd be surprised), 1/2 Indonesian). I also grew up in and lived in Indonesia the majority of my life. Nowhere did I state that only Western societies are the good ones, either, I tend to believe that Taoist and Buddhist countries have a better track record both in the modern day and in the past for the most part.
I'd appreciate if you didn't build a strawman of me, because I'm probably not the person you're imagining in your head. It's shocking, but people outside the west can also believe the west is doing things right and would like them to continue doing so, often because of the cultures they've observed back home.
No, what I consider barbarism is a system of being in which it's okay to commit a brutal beheading because the victim dared to show some drawings of a guy you call a Prophet. Or the one that throws people they don't like off of buildings. Or the one that buries people in the ground and chucks rocks at their heads until they die. Or preventing little girls from attending primary and high schools.
How many beheadings of innocent people exercising their freedoms provided by the nation they were born in are we okay with until we finally admit, maybe we shouldn't be letting them play in our nice garden if they're just going to kick the flowers and rip out the roots?
I grew up in Indonesia, and the entire reason I'm in the West is because of these types of people who'd do such heinous things. And guess what? The Europeans welcomed me with wide open arms, whereas many of my own countrymen would have me grievously harmed due to not being a follower of their hideous beliefs.
it was evident to me from your other comments that you yourself are an immigrant to the west, but it was also evident that you believed the west is in a better place because "it is doing things right", and therefore other places (including where you came from) are doing things wrong. my comment was less about who you are (ethnically, passport-wise, etc), but about the cultural superiority you ascribe to the west with your comment (which many non-white non-westerners do). i myself am an american citizen by immigration, probably for similar reasons to yourself, after having lived approx half my life in 4 other countries, but i don't know how relevant that is either. that these countries have welcomed you and i with open arms doesn't reinforce your opinion that they won't harm someone who didn't follow their beliefs, it just so happens that we follow their beliefs and so we get along. in fact, your comment is literally arguing for not welcoming people who don't follow your beliefs (assuming they are of violent intent).
this discussion imo is far too complex for a HN comment thread, but your depiction of "barbarism" is deeply rooted in western narratives omitting details such as many people from those places also find those atrocities terrible, and they are perpetuated because of a few powerful bigoted people and lots of propaganda. when atrocities are justified with propaganda, i think it's crude to think the people or the societies are barbaric as much as the leaders (usu. religious ones) are. western societies moved past honor killings, feudalism, slavery, concentration camps and other barbaric practices not-so-long ago, and to a great extent because of the resources they extracted from other countries during that time afforded them to bandwidth to focus on equitable societies. following that, wanting to isolate people of those other societies from also becoming part of these more equitable societies by precluding them as barbaric and therefore shouldn't be allowed here, imo, is what is barbaric.
the contemporary west has also repeatedly shown itself capable of direct barbarism too, like brutally levelling a school of innocent children in Pakistan or drone-striking innocents as collateral damage with no restraint. or what, is unjustified murder & cruelty only barbaric when done on your own soil, and fair game done in someone else's country with citizen tax dollars?
also somewhat unrelated but yes, serbian is white insofar as they genetically present features mostly associated with western white society (light-colored eyes, hair color other than black, caucasian bone structure) so without considering family circumstances/political background, that's white, at least on observation. of course with your mixed heritage i understand this may not be true of you specifically.
Also, it wasn't solely the 6 teens, it was also their parents and their communities at large outraged about what the teacher did and wanting his head on a spike (show a drawing of Muhammad). Not to forget the spark of the outrage, the girl who was skipping class and lied about what the teacher did, which instigated it all.
There was also that small Charlie Hebdo thing, and the Quran burning in Sweden, and countless other similar events over the years in Europe alone.
I was born and grew up in Indonesia, and the crap that was happening in Aceh, one of the only islands in Indonesia that practices Sharia law whereas the rest of the country is more secular, churns the stomach. I have no problems with Islam for the most part, but proponents of Sharia law are truly sociopathic monsters that have no place in the 21st century.
Freedom of choice? You realize we're talking about a man who got beheaded because of showing drawings of Muhammad to his students, right? (Ignoring the fact that the instigator of the whole event lied about what he actually did)
Do I not have the freedom of choice of not wanting people who will murder over something like that in the same country as myself?
> Do you believe you are presenting an honest appraisal of both the upside risk and downside risk of immigration?
I never said I'm anti-immigration. I'm an immigrant mysely, soon to be a naturalized citizen of my host country after years of hard work at embracing its culture and traditions as much as I can.
I am, however, anti-immigration if the kind of people we're talking about are the types of people that go around beheading people, regardless of their reasoning.
I’m talking about immigration as a haystack, but you seem to think that we can know in advance who the needles are.
Are you under the impression that we can tell barbarians apart from other immigrants and that we still let them in the country?
It sounds like you are listening to propaganda media and have no idea what is actually happening with immigration dynamics right now.
The barbarians are all religious. The only way to reduce the chance of terrorism to near zero is to either stop all immigration or to stop immigration of religious people. We don’t, because this country was founded by religious zealots and because we value freedom.
I've seen this a bit throughout the discussion so let's make it explicit: how on earth would someone socialized in a world where women are second tier, murders in the name of protecting the family honor, sidelining official judiciary systems, putting religion over the state, rape, sexual assault and on an on integrate well with a country that has totally different values (i.e. is a child of enlightenment)? How does that work? We see again and again, that it does not work. We (=Germany) have plenty of statistics to offer. Why some countries (muslim countries btw) have a way higher part of that and others don't.
How is the culture of Talibans compatible with western morale? How? It's just not. We aren't all the same, that's just ignoring the truth of how the world works and is plenty naive. That doesn't mean that these people are lesser beings, but that the gap between "them" and "us" (which is a culture thing btw, not a gene thing) is bigger. And that also means that it's not equidistant throughout. We're not all socialized equally.
40% of suspects don't have a German passport while the base group is 15% relative to the whole country.
Opinons like yours prevent successful immigration discussions because you have the wrong foundation. That prevents us from having a) a proper integration discussion b) solving current issues and c) creating a working immigration system.
A monoculture is almost always worse. The mix is what has made--and often continues--to make countries stronger. We can disagree about the quantity or blends, yet it seems obvious to me from insular cultures that we have to have more than zero.
Sure. I don't think even the most rabid anti immigration advocate would hold the number at zero, but using the GP's logic ("the mix is always better") the Native Americans should be quite grateful they were culturally enriched by the incoming Europeans.
All mass influxes of immigrant communities will have some crime element initially due to poverty and discrimination.
This is normal and should be expected.
It’s a part of the integration process over initial generations.
For the US, you can trace the phenomena to the influx of Irish Catholics in the early 1800s and from there to…
Eastern European Jews, Italians, Armenians, Russians, Cubans, Chinese, Indians, Puerto-Ricans, Dominicans, Central Americans, Nigerians, Somalians and other immigrant communities.
> History and data from various European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations
This might be true, but some European countries are notoriously hard to integrate. The situation could be vastly different in societies that aren’t monocultural, e.g. USA.
As far as I understand it, this study is of limited use in discussing today's illegal immigration wave because of two reasons: one, it does not distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants; and two, it does not distinguish between the incentives driving immigrants before the establishment of the welfare state and those thereafter.
It stands to obvious reason that an invited houseguest is better-behaved than one that jumped the fence to be there, and doubly so if there is free cake being served. Any claims to the contrary need to examine the two groups separately.
Again, laying low is what illegal immigrants do. What “free cake” do illegal immigrants get? Shelter and food?
Just look at Georgia’s law a few years ago where they enforced strict paperwork with the threat of arresting the employer - probably the worst productive year for agriculture because they didn’t have cheap labor to rely on.
Enforce deportation to the greatest extent possible but be prepared to pay for it.
To my knowledge, there is no version of this claim that distinguishes between illegal and legal immigrants. (I'd be happy to be proven wrong.) In fact, it would be silly to claim that illegal immigrants as a group commit fewer crimes per capita than natives, since 100% of them have already violated laws by being on US soil to begin with.
Legal immigrants, on the other hand, are absolutely less likely to engage in criminal behavior than the general population, because they are both selected for positive traits as well as knowing that a criminal record will jeopardize their chances of citizenship.
Citations/sources conspicuously absent. If you go far back enough, just about the entire population of the US could be considered immigrants. Which wave of immigrants are you referring to? Are you including petty crimes in your claim or just the more serious ones?
If voters are concerned about crime, then the need to educated that immigrants, even illegal immigrants, have crime rates about the same as Americans at large.
Because legal immigrants are both pre-filtered and have something to lose, it’s more reasonable to take the approach that one crime is too many with immigration, rather than comparing with the crime rate of society at large.
This is a MAGA talking point so there are people who agree with your take. I think that is an unreasonable and ridiculous position given its impossibility. In light of how much the US benefits from immigration overall, it’s also shortsighted.
Zero immigrant crime is absolutely impossible, I agree, but targeting zero crime should be an immigration policy goal. Enshrining some moral obligation to help the rest of the world into law is wrong.
Again, you’re repeating MAGA talking points. Targeting zero crime is code for restricting legal immigration via Byzantine immigration requirements. Moreover, the goal has been largely achieved: immigrants are significantly less likely to commit crimes than Americans [1], [2]. Your last sentence is nonsensical in the current context.
If we are applying that emotionally charged nonsense as a standard then why not apply the same standard to the victims of police murders and conclude that the police need deported? Or exilr all doctors given the number of molesters among them?
>> If we are applying that emotionally charged nonsense..
I don’t see how that is emotionally charged. The simple fact is Jocelyn Nungaray would likely be alive today if that person had been prevented from illegally crossing the border.
Your other argument is irrelevant to my point that if border laws were enforced the crime could not have occurred in the first place.
You cannot use Europe as an example, because, it might surprise you, but European cultures are vastly different from American culture. A lot of the marginalized groups in Europe, have no problem integrating in the US.
And to put the blame of lack of integration purely on the immigrant group is very disingenuous when you have all these far-right political parties openly showing their colours and saying matter of fact that they do not want any foreigners, including legal ones, including educated ones.
And finally, what's the link between integration and crime? I don't see the connection. If anything, the people who are least integrated are the ones who are the most law abiding. The lead a pious life according to their faith. They aren't the ones going around dealing drugs in night clubs. Those drug dealers are much more integrated in the host culture. After all drug consumption is very European.
> And finally, what's the link between integration and crime? I don't see the connection.
Here's some data from Denmark[0], for example, that breaks down various statistics for different immigrant groups in Denmark. I take it as axiomatic that immigrants from other Western countries are better integrated to Danish society than those from farther-away (culturally speaking) places[1]. You can see that as a group, immigrants from majority Muslim countries are very strongly overrepresented in violent crime.
> to put the blame of lack of integration purely on the immigrant group is very disingenuous
Modern immigration isn't slavery, where someone was forcibly brought to a new land against their will. Nobody has a right to be in any country they please, other than their home. So it follows that the onus is on immigrants to assimilate to the laws and cultures of the country they voluntarily chose to go to. Of course, it would be welcoming of the host country to facilitate that process, but I don't see that as being obligatory.
> History and data from various European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations...
I wish we as a society could focus on people, not ethnic groups.
Deport people who can't assimilate, keep those who can. Figure out more accurate ways to determine who is who then skin color (or even things like personal taste).
Some stereotypes are backed by statistics, but there's a reason why all stereotypes are bad.
> The study found that undocumented immigrants had substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses. Relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.
Conservative voters also think crime in general is spiraling out of control, because a certain fan of fake tanning products keeps shouting it to them. It's not even remotely true. Both violent and property crime have plunged for decades and by and large is still falling: https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024...
Hilariously, a significant uptick in homicides occurred during Fake Tanning Product's presidency, and it's dropped during Biden's:
> In 2020, for example, the U.S. murder rate saw its largest single-year increase on record – and by 2022, it remained considerably higher than before the coronavirus pandemic. Preliminary data for 2023, however, suggests that the murder rate fell substantially last year.
Voters were also 'concerned' Democrats were running a pedo ring out of a pizza shop basement. That pizza shop does not even have a basement. By your logic, we should be hiring more FBI agents to inspect pizza shops looking for pedo rings because "voters are concerned" and writing legislation that requires pizza shop owners get CORI checks.
> History and data from various European nations
Why are you using historical data from another continent that is very different culturally, when there's data from the US Undocumented migrants and immigrants in the US commit half the crime US citizens do. Probably because they're here to work to do things like send money home, and so they're keeping their heads down (not to mention, busy working...)
I already provided a study, but here's more about the issue. The Brennan Center article includes links to numerous studies refuting your claims. The evidence is overwhelmingly conclusive: immigrants, documented or not, commit significantly fewer crimes per capita than US citizens.
Why stop at the country level? We could just as easily have ethnic and cultural homogeneity on a global level. We'd have much lower crime and higher employment if all culture world-wide were homogenous. No ghettoized countries and such. /s
Lesser? The US is the largest economy in the history of the world. And military. It is responsible for brokering and maintaining the freest, most prosperous time in history — the post WWII globalization.
Oh, here’s where I’ll be a little less, er, academic — as someone who lives in a city shaped by the influx of Irish and Italian immigrants - fuck out of here with “lesser”.
Does a big economy and military make a country great? America is in shambles in terms of order, governance, rule of law—the constitution has been shredded—and social trust, which is exactly what you would expect to be affected by social change from immigration.
I said “arguably lesser,” because people obviously have different utility functions. I would say an orderly and well governed society like Sweden or Germany is better than a chaotic and disorderly but somewhat richer society like the United States. Obviously people may differ on that. My point is that immigration changed the country fundamentally.
I agree with you. There was clearly a lot of well documented tension between different ethnic groups in the US, during the post Civil War Period up to the elections of FDR and Kennedy, even after, especially in eastern cities. People who dismiss this as just 'bigotry and ignorance' are giving a hand-wavy explanation. There were legitimately different views and interests and cultures between the groups. There still is. If a political divide is real and one side wins, it stands to reason that side made changes that favored their group. So clearly outcomes are different.
> America is in shambles in terms of order, governance, rule of law
Or we could try another perspective: America is, beyond peradventure, the most successful continent-wide, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-faith society in the history of the world. Lots of problems, but we're working on them.
That is gerrymandered with qualifiers like some government RFP designed with a specific vendor in mind.
What most people want is an orderly, well-functioning society with a government that serves their needs. The United States is closer to a third world country on that front than Western European or Scandinavian countries. And it’s only going to get worse. The prosperity of California today, for example, is the result of inertia from the well-governed California of the 1960s-1980s. At the time, the foreign-born population had dropped below 5%. Now it’s over 15%.
> What most people want is an orderly, well-functioning society with a government that serves their needs.
Most people also want vigorous good health, satisfying work, plenty of income, and rewarding personal relationships. They'd also be glad to have well-adjusted children who are independent and self-motivated yet always listen to their parents' wise counsel. (And more than a few kids want a pony ....)
Sadly, life doesn't always work that way. It certainly doesn't do so reliably and scalably, or at least we haven't figured out how to make it so.
There's also the challenge of trying to achieve quasi-static local "maxima" (so-called) in an inescapably-turbulent world. It's not clear we've sufficiently explored the costs and burdens of such an effort.
> The United States is closer to a third world country on that front than Western European or Scandinavian countries.
Depends on what you're optimizing for. The international order supported by Pax Americana isn't perfect, but it beats anything the world has seen since Pax Britannia — and again, America and its allies are working on improving it.
> At the time, [California's] foreign-born population had dropped below 5%. Now it’s over 15%.
Oh, the irony of a scion of a successful immigrant family saying (in effect): OK, we got here and made good, so it's time to shut the gates ....
> Sadly, life doesn't always work that way. It certainly doesn't do so reliably and scalably, or at least we haven't figured out how to make it so.
I don't disagree that we're stuck with the cultural schisms we have, at least in the near term. But that doesn't mean we must continue to make things worse through mass immigration. We could do what we did in the 1920s, dramatically curtail immigration, and work on assimilating all the people we already have.
> Depends on what you're optimizing for. The international order supported by Pax Americana isn't perfect, but it beats anything the world has seen since Pax Britannia — and again, America and its allies are working on improving it.
Sure. But it seems self-evident that American policy should be optimizing for the well-being of Americans, not those of other people in other countries.
> Oh, the irony of a scion of a successful immigrant family saying (in effect): OK, we got here and made good, so it's time to shut the gates ....
It's not ironic--I also think the government should raise my taxes for the good of the rest of the country. I'm grateful to have been given the opportunity to grow up in Virginia in the 1990s. But I can also see that the place I grew up no longer exists because of the very immigration wave of which my family was a part.
Moreover, as a foreigner, I'm better positioned to understand how immigrants bring with them deep-seated cultural attitudes even when they assimilate at a superficial level.
Think I learned it from Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court where it appears with some frequency:
But come—never mind about that; let’s—have you got such a thing as a map of that region about you? Now a good map—”
“Is it peradventure that manner of thing which of late the unbelievers have brought from over the great seas, which, being boiled in oil, and an onion and salt added thereto, doth—”
> Peradventure is a good word. Do you have to be a lawyer to know it?
Agreed that it's a good word. I'd never heard or seen it myself until I was a mid-level partner at my then-law firm, and our senior partner used the phrase "beyond peradventure."
Yeah, it's probably the worst comment I've ever seen Rayiner write. (This is the nicest way I can word this comment; it'd be impossible for me to say what I really feel about that insult to my heritage without breaking the site guidelines.)
Irish people such as my ancestors fought and died for America in WWII. They were among the finest patriots who served the country.
It was a demented comment. Like the parent commenter, I'm living in a city built in large part by Irish and Italian immigrants (as well as members of a couple of other ethnic groups which people are happy to mock, if they're the kind of people who mock ethnic groups) well before FDR was elected (WTF?) and... I just don't know where to begin...
I'm loath to engage more with this weird anti-Irish prejudice, but I should point out that your blaming the Irish (and Italians apparently?) for FDR is ahistorical. FDR won 42 of 48 states and won the popular vote against Hoover by 17%, about 7 million votes. The total number of Irish immigrants who arrived in the US during that time was like 350k [1]. Needless to say, FDR was also not Catholic.
Crime among immigrants is largely correlated with unemployment rates. European countries with immigrant crime problems have high unemployment rates, the US does not.
This is not a good explanation without also looking at who is unemployed. In Sweden, the unemployment is low:ish but it is basically non-existent with the natives, but very high among immigrants. So it might be true that crime correlates with unemployment rates, but Sweden does not have a high unemployment.
Canada has a much higher middle Eastern population than Sweden. Canada does not have a middle Eastern crime problem nor a middle Eastern unemployment problem.
I imagine the biggest difference is that the core of this group has been in Canada for almost 50 years.
Those voters concerns aren't driven by the actuality of social issues with the integration of Somalis they are largely driven by racism and fantasy while on the overall actual crime continues to decline.
> the Republican anti-immigrant platform because it seems to me there is significant brain drain from many countries to the U.S. and that contributes to our success.
Explain how unskilled illegal immigrants contribute to our success. I'm open minded but I've yet to hear anything convincing.
No one is opposed to the legal immigration of skilled workers.
There’s a very sizable number of low paying, dirty, dangerous, and/or boring jobs that we can’t find enough locals to do. Think farm hands, home care aides, meat processors, etc. Unskilled immigrants do those jobs because that’s what is available to them (I.e unskilled). If they weren’t doing those jobs, we’d have to pay significantly more for the goods and services that labor depends on. Immigrant labor is disinflationary or at least prevents or ameliorates it.
They're low paying because (often illegal) immigrants from other countries either
A) are happy to put up with what is a luxurious salary for back home, but barely liveable locally
Or B) don't have a choice once they're in, since they practically become indentured servants
In the Netherlands, no dutchie wants to work construction for example, because immigrants from Eastern Europe often take under-the-table deals where they get paid drastically less than what a Dutchie would command, though still much higher than any job they'd get back home. The same happens everywhere.
The answer is NOT to bring the country down by mass-importing low skilled workers, but by forcing these hugely profitable companies to actually invest in the country and its citizens by paying all employees as it should.
> The answer is NOT to bring the country down by mass-importing low skilled workers
My great grandparents came to this country as low skilled workers. I work with a second generation computer programmer whose parents came as unskilled workers. I know a guy from Guatemala who cleans houses and put his three kids through college. He just about explodes with pride when he talks about his kids.
anecdotally, as an Italian i worked summer jobs in the rural side few years ago being paid 4$ an hour off the table, and it was considered a very good pay. I hear all the time of illegal migrants being paid 2/3 $ an hour without any contract
Both Dutch natives and EU-migrants are to be paid minimum wage, however it is a common trick when hiring migrants to charge them a ridiculous amount of rent for very sub-par accommodation nearby the jobsite. For example €600/month for a bunk-bed in a room with eight others. That is a way many temp agencies earn extra from migrants.
> Both Dutch natives and EU-migrants are to be paid minimum wage
In theory, yes, but I know a decent number of my own countrymen (Serbians) that most definitely aren't legally employed in NL, but they're still working construction. It's vile, but it is what it is. (Not them, the companies are vile for what they're doing, the workers are simply surviving however they can)
I don't know the contract details but these workers are picked up at the facility every day with an 8-person van and brought to the job site. Not only will it be very difficult to get a rental apartment for 2 months at less than €600/month, you also miss out on the transportation if you do.
And these jobs are usually picking strawberries out in the rural sections or working for Amazon at some industrial estate that doesn't have public transit late at night.
I’m always deeply uncomfortable with this argument. It sounds like justification for a “slave” class to do undesirable jobs with no legal protections and sub minimum wage, just so Americans can save a few bucks at the supermarket. But at what moral cost? We can’t have it both ways—if they’re here working, then it needs to be at full American wage with full American regulation/oversight. But that itself defeats the purpose of hiring undocumented workers.
Part of what perpetuates this sort of thing is a general idea in society that one can’t do or learn something because that’s not possible for them. I’m of the opinion that if sufficiently motivated and with sufficient constraints removed, anyone can learn and do anything. The only difference between an engineer and someone breaking their back for work is that the engineer was probably coddled from birth into being told they can do anything including engineering. Not as a pipe dream but a clear path: take these classes, apply to this college, take this internship, take this job.
Meanwhile the laborer was probably told all their life they don’t have what it takes, either explicitly or not, and that thinking held them back their entire life. Why try hard in school if I am “not smart”? Why try and go to college if I can’t pay for it? Why not just do what my neighbor or my uncle does that I know is possible? Many people need to be reminded that everything is possible if they aren’t dissuaded by unhelpful ideas or people.
<< I’m of the opinion that if sufficiently motivated and with sufficient constraints removed, anyone can learn and do anything.
Anyone can do anything if they believe enough..
It is a nice sentiment and I cling to it myself more often than not, because there is something soothing about it. The unfortunate reality, however, is that being forced onto thing for which I have no predisposition, is, uhh, counterproductive at best.
In short, I disagree with pre-supposition that your position requires ( we are all amorphous blobs that can be molded into whatever with sufficient amount of force ). And that is before we get to the question of whether it is even worthwhile to teach a kid with down syndrome calculus? Not possible. Worthwhile.
<< Many people need to be reminded that everything is possible if they aren’t dissuaded by unhelpful ideas or people.
No. People need to understand themselves. They need to experience their limits and then cater to their strengths and weaknesses accordingly. It is unhelpful to think that billions people on this planet are interchangeable cogs. We are not.
I am extremely unlikely to ever be like Georgi Gerganov. I simply do not believe I have the brain capacity needed.
It is fine to aspire, but I am not changing the world tomorrow.
If you believe that anyone can do anything, you have never done something properly difficult and watched yourself and / or others fail despite trying hard.
Inappropriate dissuasion surely exists, but you don't help your case by making such claims.
>It sounds like justification for a “slave” class to do undesirable jobs
It's the exact opposite. The slavery is being trapped in Cuba which the person decided to leave by their own free will to make it to America, where working a terrible factory job is going to make them ten times richer than they would have been otherwise.
Is you being uncomfortable with this idea actually more important than giving that person a shot to work himself to a normal American life within two decades and certainly for their kids?
It’s shocking to me that the argument that consistently gets trotted out as to why we should accept illegal immigration is that they perform jobs too dangerous and poorly paid for non-illegal immigrants to do. Perhaps if there wasn’t a never ending stream of people so poor and powerless to take advantage of, these industries might be forced to pay livable wages or provide better protections.
It’s insane that the supposedly progressive faction of American politics is arguing in favor of a system that amounts to a modern version of indentured servitude and systemic violation of labor rights, all for the sake of cheaper fruit and meat.
These jobs are low-paying because they're broadly unproductive. If some of them weren't doing these jobs, the wages paid for them at the margin would increase. We are vastly better off importing more skilled immigrants to high-income countries, compared to unskilled ones.
How can you call literally feeding the people “broadly unproductive”? It’s low margin, but you can’t have a society supporting your margins without someone doing the bottom jobs.
If we didn't have lower wage workers doing farm work food would be way more expensive and less diverse. I'm not sure how you judge the productivity of the worker...
They are skilled. Try taking the best and brightest out of Silicon Valley and put them on farms, orchards, and in construction, and see how well they do.
This elitist attitude that low-paid workers are "unskilled" workers is bullshit and needs to go.
As a software engineer who has done plenty of home improvement, gardening, automotive repair, etc, I think the best and brightest would learn quickly.
Now, let's take the average farmer, orchard worker, construction worker, and then chuck them into a software job. They wouldn't know where to start and wouldn't get anywhere without the same educational basics that 99% of developers have gone through. That's not elitist, it's just reality.
So, there's a clear distinction to be made and it's not necessary to water down every word in the English language because we're afraid of hurting someone's feelings.
I’m struck how you can’t see that both situations are exactly the same. Go to a strawberry field. Would you have any idea what to do as soon as you arrived? Absolutely not. No one is born knowing how to manage a farm from instinct. You’d need to learn how the farm works too.
I think the argument isn't "engineer" vs. "farmer", but rather engineer (or doctor, interpreter, commercial farmer/farm manager, industrial project manager, any other specialization that realistically requires years of training) vs. lower-skilled labor like farmhand, non-management/unspecialized construction worker, stuff that can be taught and learned relatively quickly.
I wouldn't call "low-skilled" workers _unproductive_ per se, and personally think they're incredibly valuable, but economically, the cost/difficulty of replacing a "low-skilled" worker is relatively low: it's a lot easier to find a replacement farmhand than it is a replacement farmer that manages the farm itself.
Picking strawberries is different than managing a farm. Imagine your 4 year old being a shot caller at the farm and how that might go. Would you have strawberries next season to even pick? Does your 4yo know how to sell thousands of pounds of strawberries?
Uh-huh. Let's see all those soft keyboard jockeys be efficient at hanging drywall and working on a roof all day long with no air conditioning in Texas or Arizona. They won't. They don't have what it takes.
Not all of us "keyboard jockeys" grew up soft and sheltered in big cities. The dry heat of TX/AZ isn't that bad compared to the sweltering humidity of the southeast ;)
I'm from the bayou. I know damned good and well what I'm talking about. Roofing and construction for a living is not the same as occasionally going outside and sitting around in the heat.
You're absolutely right that 'skilled' is merely a relative term and ultimately a social construct. But nonetheless, the fact remains that those skills are so much more abundant and are not soaked up by existing demand (which would drive wage increases at the margin).
It means, invariably, that they work positions that do not require high education. That's it. Any other euphemism in its place would just be in service of the same meaning.
> Your argument seems to be that a larger population leads to lower wages
It's not just because of a larger population, it's also because illegal immigrants are often desperate, often willing to accept a much lower standard of living than locals, and therefore often willing to work for very low wages (sometimes illegally low)
Thus creating an under-class of workers who keep wages from ever going up to where they should be
You're exactly the sort of person who also maintains that burger flippers don't deserve a liveable wage and that there's no such thing as a liveable wage outside of what the market dictates. You'll turn around and scream about inflation due to "highly paid Americans" picking fruit, and demand that something must be done about such outrages. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
So the illegal immigration issue is not important to you for its economics affects or changes to quality of life but just due to your fear of the other. Thank you for making your priorities more clear.
> for its economics affects or changes to quality of life
The premise of the comment that you are responding to is that because of supply and demand, and because these people are desperate, it reducing the wages for those jobs and makes those bad jobs worse.
Thats horrible and less people should be doing those bad jobs, and the wages should increase! Desperate immigrants doing those jobs is just people pushing off bad things to a vulnerable population, and the world would be better off if those jobs got automated away entirely.
if you don’t think lots of immigrants (and likely illegal immigrants) work as farm hands and at meat processor plants, you have clearly not spent much time in those industries
Economists say every immigrant is a net economic positive to the nation. They eat,buy food clothing, cars. Every immigrant child is a net negative to the state,at least until they turn 18. But it isn't even. Net neg per kid of maybe 800 a year, positive of each adult of 1200-1600 are the numbers I've heard on freakonomics podcast. Their guests proposed solution was to have the feds pay the states per an immigrant child to offset who bears the costs. I don't think it's even a debatable position that each immigrant is a net economic positive, in the long term. Some political groups worrying about losing their culture is a completely different kettle of fish.
This net economic benefit of immigrants varies based on their background and skill sets. In Denmark for example, MENA immigrants are a net drain throughout their entire productive work lives.
> Economists say every immigrant is a net economic positive to the nation
This isn’t true in general and depends on the local economy and the immigrants country of origin. MENA migrants are a net loss for Germany, for example.
Even if economists agree, the money these immigrants spend lands in the pockets of rich capitalists.
The entire topic is far more nuanced than you make it out to be.
> Economists say every immigrant is a net economic positive to the nation.
This can only be true if they sustain themselves on their own work. An immigrant that does not work and only lives on subsidies can hardly be called a net positive.
This is not behavior exclusive to immigrants though. Either way the welfare state is not very strong in the US. There are 75,000 homeless people in LA county for example.
There's an enormous welfare state in the US through what is essentially jobs programs.
Health insurance companies, for example, are a negative drain on society, yet they employ hundreds of thousands of workers, in what can only be explained as a make-work program for pointless bureaucracy.
Lots of this in the DOD as well. And the homeless program administrators, which you mentioned.
It's just not explicit welfare to the poorest of the poor and there are a few implicit steps, because otherwise it looks bad.
Why would we be opposed to unskilled immigrants? The majority of the people who came here from Europe in the 1700s and 1800s were laborers, factory workers, farmers, and other simple occupations. Why are we pulling up the ladder behind them? Did you want to freeze the US as it was circa 1950? Things change man. The US isn't forever, anymore than Rome was. You gotta stop trying to fight the current and pretending that by preventing "unskilled immigration" you can maintain the US in some hypothetical idealized state completely specific to your imagination.
> The majority of the people who came here from Europe in the 1700s and 1800s were laborers, factory workers, farmers, and other simple occupations. Why are we pulling up the ladder behind them?
The welfare state did not exist in that time, so the cost of absorbing immigration was confined to acculturation. Immigrants had to quickly start generating value or perish. The incentives are radically different now and the marginal cost to society of absorbing each additional immigrant is much higher.
US government spending as a percentage of GDP remained low single digits until WW1; it is roughly 35% today.
> You gotta stop trying to fight the current
You must also remember that the natural state of everything is decay, and the natural state of mankind in particular is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". The current grinds everything down to sand. It is incumbent upon everyone to fight the current in the way that affords the greatest benefit to society.
I believe that the entropic state of human civilization is brutal authoritarianism.
Fight the current, indeed.
It's quite remarkable how effectively the citizens of the United States have managed to do that over the years. To resist the sweet, seductive lies of utopians who seek power.
What welfare costs are you referring to? Is there actual evidence that immigrants are a drain on the country? The information that I'm seeing suggests that they are a net positive in terms of taxes.
That's a fair point, but I also think that there is nuance.
The economy of most major cities isn't based on the agricultural industry that most illegal immigrants work in.
Cities generally already have high housing costs and density. So a sudden population surge is going to be more difficult to manage.
Basically Abbott bussed immigrants to the places that are least setup to be able to absorb them. So it's not surprising that there are problems. That doesn't necessarily reflect on whether immigrants are a net gain once they have been absorbed into the economy.
I lived in Texas for most of my life. Immigrants quite literally fueled the economy of Texas. Most homes in North Texas shift and require foundation leveling or repair every 8-10 years; estimates for this kind of work range from cheap to very expensive and it's done the same way. The difference is immigrants doing the work vs not. There's a certain amount of migratory ag that is supported by immigrants. Harbors are full of immigrant businesses and services being provided. The massive expansion in housing has mostly been facilitated by an immigrant labor force.
I lived under George W Bush, Rick Perry, and Greg Abbott as governors. I can tell you what distinguishes Greg Abbott from the rest of them is that Greg Abbott is an absolute piece of shit. I say that with zero embellishing. When I came home from the military there was this conspiracy theory called Jade Helm rocking Texas that a scheduled military training exercise in Texas was actually an exercise in taking peoples guns. Greg Abbott knew about and authorized the exercise, but stoked fears anyway: https://www.texastribune.org/2018/05/03/hysteria-over-jade-h...
Greg quite literally pried the Houston ISD's autonomy from them despite them completing the state mandate and progressing far better than anyone thought they would in the allotted time. Why? So he could institute a voucher system so that kids can go to private, Christian schools with state money: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/03/27/real-sto...
The man is a populist of the worst type. He takes an already bad situation, dumps fuel on it, calls it a solution, and acts none the wiser when things blow up; when they do inevitably blow up, he always has a patsy to blame. This is all to say, before I'd trust the actions of Greg Abbott and shipping people to new towns you should probably ask yourself, "What political game could Greg be playing?" and that will be closer to the truth than any rationalization you can come up with.
Sure, I agree that Greg Abbott is an asshole. That doesn't necessarily make him wrong, though? I'm not looking at his actions, it's obviously political theatre. The actions that appear to be revelatory to me are the ones by Democratic-led cities that went from grandstanding of their own to immediately backpedaling when the burden of providing social services to illegal immigrants was shared with them. Greg Abbott is taking a bad situation and sharing it with his neighbors, but they were closing their eyes and saying "there is no problem, and it's good actually" until they had to deal with it themselves.
Conservatives play funny games in their states to appease their racist and misinformed base. I wouldn’t think too deeply about it. California for example doesn’t do that song and dance and their economy is better than texas. 5th best in the world in fact if you considered california its own state separate from the rest of the US.
The public sentiment in those cities regarding immigration has completely flipped from the moment the buses started arriving. They were loudly in favor of refusing to enforce immigration laws when El Paso, Texas was dealing with hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossings over decades, but the second a few thousand start showing up in buses in Chicago and New York City, they declare a state of emergency and start demanding the stop of the immigrants being transported to their cities because they have no room. And now it’s probably the single strongest issue the Republicans are going to win on in the election.
I’m not conservative, but sending illegal migrants directly to sanctuary cities might be the single most effective strategic political move in my lifetime. It flipped a decades old stalemate on its head practically overnight.
Sure, in the beginning but it also proved the Republican point that you can't handle an unrestricted amount of immigration, even in large cities which also goes in favour of immigration restrictions (and of course not total immigration blockage which is not feasible and silly).
Large cities don't have the sorts of agricultural jobs that illegal immigrants generally work. They also already have high cost of living and housing shortages. So it's not surprising that they have a limited ability to absorb illegal immigrants into their workforce.
Stepping back a moment. We also probably shouldn't be surprised that disorganized mass immigration is causing problems. That's why Democrats generally advocate comprehensive immigration reform. Its going to be easier to absorb immigration if its happening in an orderly manner.
> Did you want to freeze the US as it was circa 1950?
That's exactly what we're doing (in Europe and East Asia even more so than the U.S.) by opposing skilled migration. Increasing legal skilled migration is much more critical, though other concerns such as asylum rights for those fleeing from an oppressive government or a war-ravaged country also matter quite a bit.
There’s still work these people are finding in the US. Ever been to socal? Go to an el salvador neighborhood, one of the most recent immigrant communities. Absolutely buzzing with people going to their various jobs. Are they stamping out Fords? No. Pouring cement and hanging drywall maybe, or cooking on the line. There’s still plenty of work for people who can offer their time and their two hands over a credentialed resume in the US.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould
If you believe that quote as I do then unskilled laborers can have intelligent children. Making to the United States is quite a test of endurance, flexability and competance so people who pass that filter are quite likely to be intelligent
How many unskilled laborers do we need to accept to get one future Einstein? The ratio matters.
>Making to the United States is quite a test of endurance, flexability and competance so people who pass that filter are quite likely to be intelligent
I doubt this is true in cases where you can literally just walk across the border.
I doubt you have many Mexican locals living next the the border literally walk across the border and then travel to the interior of the country. Most of them are from far away places and endure quite a challenging journey to get here. I live in San Jose in a neighborhood with many older Vietnamese boat people. Columbians have been moving in. There isn't an easy way to get from Columbia to Mexico by walking.
Crossing the Darién Gap: Migrants Risk Death on the Journey to the U.S.
Yes, the trek is hard for many. But physically hard doesn't imply cognitively hard or selective for cognitive traits. These paths are well trodden and the difficulty is purely physical.
But what about the many skilled laborers who are just as willing to immigrate to the U.S. and other high-income countries? Don't they have at least just as much of a right to try and make it there legally?
Once someone gave me a similar argument in a rather rude utilitarian way: Look at all the white kids in our society. They get all the support they need. Any Einstein in there, we will catch. Adding support want change the outcome much. But look at the immigrant's children. There's so much hidden potential. Adding support has the chance to change the outcome dramatically.
I still have to come to terms with this way of thinking but in a world of limited resources it gave something to think about.
Many are arguing the case for the net economic value of immigrant labor which I agree is a fairly compelling case. I'd like to offer an alternate avenue of attack, however: population trends.
Without immigration, U.S. population growth would be well below replacement rate. This is a growing problem throughout the entire developed world with no fair answers -- increasingly, it looks as though the next several decades of geopolitical power will be defined by which countries can attract the immigrants necessary to maintain, at minimum, some population growth.
I won't pretend that the U.S. is a race utopia. We hit just about every single branch on the way down, if I'm being honest... but most of the ethnostates currently competing for world-power status haven't even realized there's a tree that they need to be descending yet. We have a powerful edge in the coming geopolitical era as one of the most pluralistic, multicultural nations in human history. We have unmatched institutions and experience when it comes to integrating immigrants -- not to mention the incredible advantage of having a language & culture that is familiar to the majority of living humans.
In my opinion, walking back from these advantages at such a critical turning point is probably not something that the country could survive in the long-term. We either embrace our identity as the world's melting pot or we wither away as hermits.
>Without immigration, U.S. population growth would be well below replacement rate. This is a growing problem throughout the entire developed world with no fair answers
We are living in a death cult(ure), we arent reproducing maybe for economic conditions as in most developed countries wages have compressed in real terms and people prefer to have less if none kids than to lower their lifestile below what they were born into, maybe is the anti-family culture that permeates society, seiing the nuclear family as a burden to personal fullment, woman independence, career obstacle, problem for the enviroment or the miriad of other factors.
Importing migrants is just a band aid that moves the problems of our unhealthy society few years down the line, we need to focus on our dying societies.
And how would you say that these two solutions are incompatible? How does delaying the replacement rate issue with immigration prevent solving the core problem, or are you just advocating for accelerationism?
There absolutely are a lot of people who want to restrict legal immigration. If you deny that, you're just pretending that you're not helping them out.
As an immigrant who works in tech, I think the H1-B issue in particular is a bit more nuanced. I think the feeling is that H1-B's are used inappropriately as a tool to leverage salaries lower. I don't actually know the stats on that.
That being said, you do want immigrants working right? That's kinda the entire point.
No idea, but housing and jobs in many sectors are getting extremely scarce in Canada's cities due to their insane immigration policies aiming to bring in """skilled workers"""
I am opposed to legal immigration of skilled workers. My reason is because it causes what Peter Turchin called elite overproduction. We have too many highly credentialed people who fight over who gets entrance to our top schools and who monopolize the highest ranked high schools. Immigrants have more social and income mobility than natives. I would argue that the professional class has become increasingly isolated and contemptuous of non-elite citizens as they continue to grow in size and monopolize elite positions. For example, our top schools seem to mostly be the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves. Those schools feed into the most elite business and government positions giving those people disproportionate power.
The reasons for inviting them I think are a combination of disingenuous or outdated. The arguments about economic survival or humanitarian reasons just don't seem true to me anymore but that's a separate point.
Unskilled labor isn't a thing. There are plenty of people who can go from zero skill to writing decent python in a weekend (literally better than I've seen on some production systems) if given the chance. The same goes for building houses or airplanes. In real life, shit just isn't that complicated if someone is willing to spend a couple hours teaching the basics.
> there is significant brain drain from many countries to the U.S. and that contributes to our success
And I find it so tragic. It means that the best elements of a given country are being sucked out of it. How can this country ever get better if the best elements just leave it ? Immigration exists because some parts of the world just suck, with corrupt governments, wars, you name it. I don't see how anyone can be happy of migrations, it means fleeing your home and leaving your roots. I don't think most migrations are something to be happy about.
Its only tragic if you think of the world as a bunch of sports teams winning points, rather than a planet occupied by the human race. Would you rather the researcher toil fruitlessly in their home country that lacks the funding to properly support a good research environment? Or would you rather they had the opportunity to actually conduct their experiments or build their invention? They will draft a patent or a research paper that the entire world can now see coming from the US.
Or if you value community and realize all the folks with ambition leaving an area is sad for that community. I don’t have to be cheering for my hometown to win to think it’s sad someone must choose between the community they grew up in and using their talents.
Frankly, my home country doesn't deserve my brain, nor the brain of anyone else willing and able to leave it.
It's a nice sentiment, but you also can't ignore that, if people like myself are willing to go through the oftentimes extremely stressful task of emigrating with all the things that entails, there's probably a reason for it. It's not like you can just pick up and leave, after all
None of my family has been back in decades, we've long since abandoned it.
Also, that situation is a lot more likely to occur in the mother country than most people's host countries, if it doesn't happen already. There's a reason it was the East germans fleeing, and not the other way around.
> And I find it so tragic. It means that the best elements of a given country are being sucked out of it. How can this country ever get better if the best elements just leave it ?
They don't leave irreversibly, they can go back if the political and institutional milieu in their home country improves, and bring valuable insights from abroad. This dynamic has been quite common wrt. those who migrated to the Americas throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
I tend to believe you, but it's not something that's about a lot. I would be curious to know the facts of expats coming back after a while, or a least investing in their home countries
> How can this country ever get better if the best elements just leave it ?
By competing for their talent. I'm not a huge proponent of capitalism, but that's the world we live in and the world we'll die in. These countries simply aren't competitive in a way to encourage their people to stay. There are innumerous ways to combat this. But our current thinking is so clouded by short sighted profit that today's outcomes shouldn't surprise anyone.
What if *some* highly intelligent immigrants oppose American values? Sounds like a recipe for disaster. They may use their capital and ability to politically undermine our civil liberties.
Most people globally aren't used to the American interpretation of free speech or gun rights. I don't want people coming here using their talents to politically remove my rights. I think this is a fair point to make.
> I don't want people coming here using their talents to politically remove my rights.
I'm far more concerned by the people who are in power today who want to politically remove women's rights. Others are worried about those who are in power who want to remove gun rights.
Immigrants are very, very far down the list of people with power to disrupt our rights.
>What if some highly intelligent immigrants oppose American values? Sounds like a recipe for disaster. They may use their capital and ability to politically undermine our civil liberties.
That should be perfectly acceptable and within the bounds of free speech in a democratic society. It's up to you to counter "bad speech" with other speech in the marketplace of ideas. At least that's what I'm told when I complain about all of the American racists and lunatics whose speech I'm supposed to hold sacred, while they try to undermine my rights and values.
Immigrants don't need "our" permission to join "our" society, they only need the permission of the government, as a matter of legal formality. And of course one could argue that "illegal immigrants" are a part of society, just not legally, because societies aren't only defined in the context of states.
Also free speech is a universal value, is it not? It should apply equally to everyone, everywhere, all the time, and in all contexts.
You inserted their speech where I said "capital and ability". Because you support undermining those rights so you play semantic games.
I mean this sincerely, isn't the debate irrelevant? You either support those civil rights or oppose them. I don't want to put words in your mouth but I assume you oppose 1A and 2A. Why not just say it? We wouldn't have to waste time discussing ancillary nonsense.
>You inserted their speech where I said "capital and ability". Because you support undermining those rights so you play semantic games.
I never said I supported undermining any particular rights. The phrase "use their capital and ability to politically undermine our civil liberties" implies engagement in the political process, which implies free speech, which (notwithstanding your semantic games) is already established as legitimate.
>I don't want to put words in your mouth
Yes you do, your comment here does so numerous times. So feel free to argue with the strawman, I'm out.
Are American values static? If not, how did they change over time? Was it some group that used their capital and political organization to make the changes?
If so, why is it ok for one group to advocate for a change, but the similar advocacy from another group is not ok?
American values are... Pretty much static. We've been very anti government for a very long time. Left, right, center... Everyone solidly agrees they need less governance
Leftists will scream about civil rights.
Right wingers will tut tut about high taxes.
Centrists will complain about both.
But the message is clear... Less government. More individual autonomy
American government since the beginning of the 20th century has been on a nearly uninterrupted trend of increasing state power, both domestically and internationally. Politicians sometimes pretend to be anti-government to get votes, but every administration spends more than the previous one.
Not only in aggregate. The only exceptions to each administration spending more than the previous one (in real terms, inflation-adjusted) were immediately post WW1 and WW2. Look it up.
Yeah personally I'm completely uninterested in skilled immigration.
I think the only determining factor is if you demonstrate a commitment to American values.
We do not need highly skilled authoritarians. I'd rather get the freedom loving farm worker from Mexico.
I'm a Republican if that matters. I have met enough highly skilled immigrants in silicon valley to know that many hold American values in contempt.
My own family migrated here so this is not xenophobia. Many of my own ethnic background actively misunderstand and misconstrue American values and should never be allowed to work here much less given citizenship.
I have much more in common with the Hispanic farm worker and would prefer to provide a path by which they can come legally through a vetting process which also prevents gang members from flowing in.
Also we obviously need a wall on the southern border. I feel like anyone who's been to the border will come to this conclusion if they're being honest with themselves.
If you remove a handful of neighborhoods with particularly bad problems, Americas violent crime rate is on par that of Europe. Given the number of guns in those safe areas, if would seem Americans are made of some good stuff.
I honestly don't see it. Statistically or otherwise. Even if it were. It's a protected unalienable right. Cannot under any circumstances be circumvented. In my opinion of course.
Tangentially - I find it fascinating how the originalists on the supreme court get fuzzy on what a "well regulated militia" meant at the time the amendment was written.
This has been explained ad nauseum, but here goes.
Well-regulated meant, at the time, in good working order. The militia meant, and still means, able-bodied men from 18 to 45. The right was granted to the people, not the militia.
Please make snide comments in good faith, at least.
The experience of the black panthers had shown us that if many of us attempted to live by that interpretation the goal posts would just be moved by those in power.
I'm with you on this, but imagine being an American in prison for 10 years because you drilled a 1/8" hole .123" from the edge of a funny shaped piece of aluminum.
It's complicated, but tl;dr, the ATF is in a constant spiral of trying to apply the text of the National Firearms Act and a handful of other laws in the real world.
They don't define a firearm as something that can shoot bullets, they define it as (usually) the part that receives the ammunition/magazine, the "receiver", which becomes the serial-numbered portion of the gun. For some guns, it's a complicated, vaguely gun shaped object made up of welded and formed parts, for others it's something as simple as a piece of 1-2" steel tube threaded at one or both ends. This legally can be classified as a firearm and if you were to, for instance, mail it to someone across state lines, export it, sell it in some states or take it through airport security you would face jail time.
As an aside, this quirk is occasionally used by photographers and others who want hand inspection and chain of custody for expensive checked luggage, so they'll put an inert receiver in their suitcase and declare it as a firearm to the airline.
This gets further complicated by the other elements of the NFA banning machine guns and regulating short barrels, suppressors, and a couple other items. In this particular case we're talking about a specific, relatively simple aluminum receiver that can be made at home with a cheap mill or 3d printer, as it isn't pressure bearing. The ATF has deemed that this is, itself, a firearm and further, it can be modified into an illegal machine gun by drilling a hole near the top edge. In reality this does nothing, you'd need to go make or buy three-ish other distinct parts to modify a trigger group into one that supports automatic fire, as well as all the rest of the parts that make the bare receiver into a functioning firearm that can actually shoot.
As the laws are extremely complicated and subject to fairly arbitrary reinterpretation periodically, people somewhat routinely get in huge trouble for breaking them (they're enforced extremely aggressively). Some of those people are trying to poke the bear for fun, but some of them just don't realize that screwing an oil filter to the end of their rifle, or tying a shoestring to the trigger (of particular rifles) are all felonies with a 10 year prison sentence.
It's all a bit dystopian. It would be as if there were certain illegal numbers that you weren't allowed to tell your friends about...
This is a very controversial topic in Europe where Florence Bergeaud-Blackler's book about how the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to infiltrate European institutions is seen either as a conspiracy theory fueling Islamophobia or a dangerous problem that has to be dealt with to protect society.
That's a valid wish, but there is already a large number of people in America who oppose American values. So in principle there is no difference whether their number will grow by immigration, high birthrate, indoctrination of other peoples children, or adults changing their views.
So simply opposing immigration won't accomplish what you want, it will only be used as a weapon against you.
If you really want to keep your values, you need to find ways to
attract more people who have the same values.
E.g. Cubans who run away have a good immunity against communism, that's why people who make it so easy to cross the border by foot, made it hard to enter by boats.
What if some highly intelligent people oppose American values and abuse the first amendment by spreading hatred and neo-Nazi propaganda in the town square?
It’s a rhetorical question — this happens already and we handle it the way we’d handle your rhetorical question: shake our heads at the misguided worm brains, ignore it or confront them directly. But either way it’s not a threat to American civil liberties, the Bill of Rights is more robust than that.
Being strongly anti illegal immigration is among their positions, yes, but I think OP is more referring to their position of erecting additional.barriers in the way of legal immigration.
They have discovered it is easier to win political points by making current legal immigrants illegal and deporting them, than addressing what people think of as "illegal immigration". But they get to call it the same thing :-)
There's absolutely nothing preventing large "raw numbers" of legal skilled immigrants to high-income countries, except policy choices that are overtly hostile towards increasing legal immigration.
The only statement on legal immigration: "Republicans will prioritize Merit-based immigration, ensuring those admitted to our Country contribute positively to our
Society and Economy, and never become a drain on Public Resources."
The amount of room they give to interpret that vague statement however they want could fit an aircraft carrier. Their actual policy position is in their project 2025 materials and it curtails legal immigration pretty significantly along similar lines that trump attempted to tread in his first presidency.
A lot of former Trump administration officials are involved in Project 2025, at least 140, which is more than half of the people listed as authors and contributors to their Mandate for Leadership document [0]. There's also over 100 conservative organizations on the Project 2025 advisory board [1], organizations that have also endorsed Trump for president. There's a lot of overlap in this document with positions that Trump has endorsed.
It appears to everyone, on both the left and the right, that Project 2025 is what conservatives want for a future Trump administration. There doesn't seem to be much of a competing vision for the future of the Republican party, certainly nothing as detailed as this 900 page document nor as widely backed by other conservatives.
This is why a lot of people are looking at this document. Maybe you should be, too?
I do acknowledge that Trump has been trying to distance himself from Project 2025 lately, coinciding with the press coverage the details in that document have been getting.
> It appears to everyone, on both the left and the right, that Project 2025 is what conservatives want for a future Trump administration.
Sure, but it's not Trump's platform. If he wanted to implement those policies, he'd put them in his platform.
He didn't.
Just like the Democrats, lots of left wing policy groups have a list of policies they'd like Biden to implement. It would be silly of me to assume otherwise.
> I do acknowledge that Trump has been trying to distance himself from Project 2025 lately.
This is an odd take. "Trying to distance himself"? I think you mean "clarifying that those policies are not his own".
In the last ten years or so, I came to understand the parable of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” in a visceral way. We can all see the viciousness and cruelty to scapegoats is Trump and the conservatives binding principal, and that they’ve settled in immigrants as that scapegoat without much regard to legal status. You can tell me all you want that the evidence of my eyes and ears is false, but I am not able to turn them off.
It seems like Trump’s immigration stance has evolved significantly in the seven years since this article was written. A few weeks ago he appeared on the All-in podcast and promoted the idea of giving green cards en masse to foreign students upon graduation. I support the idea even if I don’t support the candidate.
Meanwhile if we forget what his lips are doing and watch for the fist we’d see his republican party has a different agenda. Namely one about picking certain favorite nations and excluding others. Really just read the project 2025 materials and forget whatever tangents he goes on, as he doesn’t hold himself accountable to what he might say.
"In fact, at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025, a CNN review found, including more than half of the people listed as authors, editors and contributors to “Mandate for Leadership,” the project’s extensive manifesto for overhauling the executive branch" [0]. Here's details on a bunch of them [1].
People and organizations, not just on the left but also over 100 influential organizations on the right [2], take Project 2025 as the desired direction for a future Trump administration. Trump himself has endorsed many of the same positions in this document.
Right or wrong, that's why people have made the association between Trump and Project 2025. This is what conservatives as a group seem to want for a future Trump administration. There doesn't seem to be a competing vision for the party, and certainly nothing laid out in 900 pages of detail.
Why wouldn't people on the left make the association between Trump and this document when so many on the right do?
Yes of course, but as I told someone else, if I said I believe the left is associated with "down with America" you would disagree. Just because 1% of the left might say that, doesn't mean it's true for all of you.
The Democrat obsession with Trump implementing Project 2025 strikes me as similar to the Republican obsession with Biden implementing the Green New Deal a few years ago. It's the president's radical legislation that isn't endorsed by the president and isn't legislation.
High-skill immigrants disproportionately found companies (whose very existence implies driving up demand in the labor market), as well as disproportionately induce new consumer demand (high-skill -> high pay -> high consumption), which again drives new companies.
Out of America (and the world's) only $1T companies:
Brin and Huang are 1st gen immigrants.
Nadella is a 1st gen immigrant; he brought Microsoft out of it's malaise.
(Jobs' bio father was an immigrant, as was Bezos' adoptive father)
3/5 ain't bad. (2/5 if you're a stickler)
Tesla, which at one point was a $T company and is currently pretty close, is also famously founded by an immigrant.
There are very few people in tech in America who will not have worked for an immigrant founder/CEO at some point in their career.
> Nadella is a 1st gen immigrant; he brought Microsoft out of it's malaise.
I agree with most of what you posted, but not enough credit is given to Ballmer here. He set Microsoft on the trajectory that Nedella followed and got the fuck out of the way. There were a lot of cringe Ballmer moments but he had a profound impact on Microsoft, probably much more so than Nadella so far. And none of this is meant to take anything away from Nadella's competency. Just that Ballmer gets blamed for a whole lot despite setting MSFT up for the success Nadella (and shareholders) enjoy.
I am not the original commenter. I am not anti immigration. I am merely critical of it. We need skilled healthcare workers. Instead giant corporations are focusing on importing software engineers o drive down wages.
Lowering wages and salaries for skilled workers has a big disinflationary effect and slashes inequality. (The bulk of inequality is indeed due to skill-biased divergence in labor income, not passive or unearned income from asset ownership.)
It's a mistake to make the good-faith assumption that Republicans have logically consistent views.
To Republicans, Cubans don't count as illegal immigrants because they're escaping "communism," and their immigrants consistently vote red. Plus, the majority of Cubans are white and Christian, unlike the brown immigrants that Republicans don't want in the country.
Because it’s functionally impossible to deport all “illegals” without massively disrupting legal immigrant communities? How exactly do you propose the illegal immigrant gestapo determine someone is here legally? Race? Accent? Stop every brown person on the street and ask for papers…? What don’t republicans understand by this
I think you could get 90% of the way to “all” with information that’s already in federal databases. People have jobs. Look at the fake / duplicate SSNs. So, John Smith with SSN 999-99-9999 is a White Male born in 1943, but the family at his residence is Asian and in their 30s? Absolutely no need to harass random people.
> require proof of citizenship/legal residence for housing, jobs, etc.?
Gestapo comparisons aside, you do understand that this is a significant deviation from the status quo in the US, right? The US can't even agree on a unified federal ID; what makes you think we're anywhere close to accepting a world in which the government is a party to civil matters like leases?
(And to be clear: enforcing this kind of introspection absolutely would require an enforcement agency with unprecedented visibility into the paychecks and housing statuses of every single person in this country.)
Er, this is already the law right? Every job I’ve held in the US, I needed to prove I’m eligible to legally work. Obviously this doesn’t work to resolve the issue at all.
Illegal immigrants have been working small restaurants, ethnic supermarkets etc. since time immemorial, law enforcement has turned a blind eye is all. Now with the rise of gig economy, there are tons of jobs where you never even see your employer, so it’s even easier: there are citizens/permanent residents/others with work permits renting out their gig accounts like Uber Eats to illegals.
Some industries, like agriculture or restaurants, rely so heavily on cheap immigrant labor that enforcing this would cause an economic crash and food prices would soar. Other industries will ask prospective employees their SSN, which illegal immigrants don't have. So, which part do you wish to change?
You're saying the only way for America, basically the richest nation in the history of the world, to produce food is to rely on illegally paying and exploiting foreigners? How do all the other less rich countries make food then?
Illegal immigrants have many methods of getting SSNs. Like, it's not even difficult.
I'm saying that it's force massive changes, and, really, increase prices significantly (food is more expensive in Europe for example). Same in restaurants, you'd have far less staff.
It's not impossible but it'd have to go with cultural changes, and have a dire impact on poor people. Just because the US is rich doesn't mean it's working well, just look at healthcare and how costly and unfair it is.
The rules exist so that certain people have a pool of “off the books” informants / assets that they can leverage. If you allow them in, then you lose the stick. If you can’t grant citizenship, then you lose the carrot.
So our immigration policy is you can either do all the work migrate legally or you can sneak in and we will legalize you. Congress should make that our official immigration policy?
As someone who isn't American, the dialogue around immigration in the US seems so odd.
I've lived in six different countries (including the US) and in every other country there is no discussion around illegal immigrants - they are deported. It's not even a political issue. Having secure borders is a norm.
Then I get to the US and there is this weird political debate around it. For someone reason it's "bad" to refer to people who enter illegally as "illegal immigrants". People argue that people who entered illegally should be legalized.
It's because the US has historically promulgated a nudge-nudge wink-wink attitude that could be summed up as "You can't come here legally, but if you get through our defenses, there will be plenty of work waiting for you."
Many of us have sympathy for people who came in under this system who generally just want to work their asses off doing jobs no American wants to do.
We're also talking about kids brought here as toddlers. Many of us think deporting these people is particularly cruel, as their home country is completely foreign to them.
> It's because the US has historically promulgated a nudge-nudge wink-wink attitude that could be summed up as "You can't come here legally, but if you get through our defenses, there will be plenty of work waiting for you."
Do you mean official US government policy? Do you have a source for that claim?
Does nudge-nudge wink-wink imply official policy to you?
How about undocumented immigrants openly hanging outside of Home Depot waiting for work, while everyone looks the other way because contractors rely on them? That feels like unofficial policy to me.
So what you're saying is you know it's true, but there isn't any evidence?
The fact that the US has a bad track record on enforcing immigration law isn't proof of a "wink wink" policy, especially if you considering huge proportion of Congress doesn't want immigration laws enforced.
Not wanting immigration laws enforced is exactly what I'm talking about with nudge-nudge wink-wink. An unenforced law isn't really a law.
Also you're crazy if you think most Republicans in Congress actually want immigration laws enforced. They like the cheap labor. They just want to use it as a wedge issue every 2-4 years.
> Not wanting immigration laws enforced is exactly what I'm talking about with nudge-nudge wink-wink.
But there are lots of explanations beyond "wink-wink" for not enforcing immigration policies. The Democrats want more immigration, even if it's illegal, so where they have the power (say SF) they don't enforce them.
That doesn't mean the Democrats are happy with the status quo of a large illegal immigrant working popoulation.
> Also you're crazy if you think most Republicans in Congress actually want immigration laws enforced.
Really? So place like Texas that are trying to stop illegal immigration at the border but being blocked really want illegal immigration? I don't think so.
The words “give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” are engraved on the Statue of Liberty. We were all taught about immigrants trying to escape poverty, war and hardship by coming to America and starting a new life for themselves and their families. So it’s got a bit of a romanticism to it, and it’s hard to blame anyone for doing whatever it takes to get their families into the country like we saw the immigrants in our history books do.
I don't really know much about India but they seem to have more illegal immigration than the US does and per https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-50670393 seem like they have discussions about amnesty there too. My assumption would be that any regional economic power with long borders will struggle with illegal immigration.
Same dialog and divide exists here in Sweden. What some call illegal immigrants, others call paperless. So it is not a US-exclusive thing, and also here, the government have a hard time to execute deportions.
Yes. Look at Europe. The UK's policy was "hostile environment", which was basically make staying illegally so hostile that people wouldn't come.
Canada loved to mock the US's treatment of illegal aliens (for political gain) until they started pouring into Canada. Even with those seeking asylum, Canada was pushing the "third country" agreement that people need to seek asylum in the first country they enter, not pass through the US and come to Canada. For illegal aliens, Canada is deporting record numbers,[2] but Canadians are pretty united in "you can't enter Canada illegally".
I lived in Asia and it was similar. Very strict tracking of legal immigrants and a robust process for removing people staying illegally.
This is disingenuous. What the term illegal is referring to is unvetted. We could make all illegal immigrants legal at the stroke of a pen, but that's completely missing the point. We want immigration to be in service to the existing population. Giving a path to citizenship to anyone who has made it here no matter the means is just to torpedo the idea that immigration should be in service to the needs of the existing citizens.
that's not my interpretation, the opposition party votes as a bloc against everything until they aren't the opposition party any more. democrats do that too. neither party can pass a filibuster in the senate so it doesn't matter, it isn't about any party position.
republicans support setting H1B visas at the same standard it was created for in 1991.
I support that. I support linking the standards of minimum compensation to inflation or some automatically moving metric. we already have several higher criteria work visas, H1B's is just the most popular.
republicans support our education visas turning into residency or work visas more seamlessly.
I support that.
the party doesn't support the empathy arguments for people that are here without a visa. I think something more holistic should be considered than mass deportation.
Its important to add nuance. We have many categories of immigration and many populations. As well as a porous mismanaged border.
That’s wrong on its face, since some legislation does get passed. They don’t oppose everything, they are selective. It’s strictly for political points.
If Republican voters supported more immigration, it could happen. They just don’t. And calling people brought here as children by their parents criminals is ridiculous.
Building a class of undocumented workers who are outside the normal legal system is simply a gift to corporations. I am staunchly against illegal immigration while being very pro legal immigration. If we need workers, bring them in legally instead of allowing them to exist in a legal grey area as exploitable labor.
The first mistake when approaching immigration is to take all the different types of immigration and even non-immigration and lower the level of detail to simply "immigration". This means:
1. refugees
2. legal immigrants
3. non-immigrants magic beam of
3.1. temporary workers ──infinite──> "iMMiGraNTs"
3.2. tourists irrationality and "mIGrAntS"
4. students
5. illegal immigrants
6. stateless
7. prisoners of war
8. etc
If you want to fix a problem you need to divide it into subproblems and solve each problem, not mix everything together and make a larger problem harder to solve.
Mixing everything together is obfuscating the problem which is the modus operandi of those who want to prevent the solution of the problem as they have an incentive to keep the problem around.
Politicians like keeping immigration a problem because it gives them a way to divide people into groups and rewarding those groups depending on their political needs, making you easier to rule. Which is what they do for everything else. In their case, you are the problem to solve, not the actual problem they so passionately talk about. And when you get angry you play right into their villain claws.
The brain gain/drain dynamics between countries is real. Brain gain is what you definitely want as a country.
I support immigration too, as long as it's people we vet. Smart people want to live here, and will jump through hoops to do so. We should make the hoops easier for them, and actually deport people who spit in their faces by waltzing over the border and staying. It's not fair to the hard-working honest people who played by the rules.
Also, you should be concerned about the crime. Have you seen what the cartel does in Mexico? It's terrifying, and those (cartel members) are not people we want here.
Cartel members are already here you know. It’s not their mere presence that results in wanton violence and a lack of government authority to deal with it.
What, you assume I think the government is good? The cartel is worse by a fair margin, but we do not have a virtuous government. The difference is that government has a modicum of public responsibility and can't/isn't likely to simply murder most* of us for no good reason.
Did you find any assumptions in the references I provided? Since you evoked the cartels as a boogeyman it seems relevant to point out that they're one of our own creation. Changes to US policy no greater or more complex than those proposed for immigration could eliminate the economic conditions which drive their violence.
Poe's law strikes again. I'm unsure if you're being sarcastic or not. I think the consequences of our actions will find us one way or another regardless of immigration policy. That's not an argument against screening, but for policy reform.
The government has a responsibility to minimize the consequences on its own people, everyone else be damned. Of course the US needs screening for immigrants, and I don’t know anyone reasonable who’d argue otherwise. Zero crime among immigrants is unrealistic, but society should make the tradeoff there based on economic and social factors instead of feeling any kind of moral obligation wrt. immigration.
I thought the republicans wanted stronger border control. Border control and immigration policy are different things. If anyone can just hop the border and walk in and we don’t deport them then our immigration policy is irrelevant because we are choosing not to enforce it.
I mean, it’s drawing a _bit_ of a long bow, but there’s a pretty cogent argument to be made that European powers in many nations funded/armed criminal gangs (by buying slaves/selling weapons), and those gangs took over the country with that backing, which destroyed what public institutions existed, and normalised “strongman coercion”.
There’s various points and counterpoints within that and I’m woefully ill equipped to evaluate them, but it’s not wrong “prima fasciae”.
Blanket accusations like this are racist. Genital mutilation is an abhorrent practice. While the impact is uniquely horrible for women, it is definitely "throwing stones in glass houses" to act as though it's a strange cultural practice to damage the nerves of a child's genitals, a practice done to millions of boys in Europe by those of multi-generational European descent.
Now, you could be opposed to both practices of course, but you are choosing to make a blanket accusation to suit a point of view.
> I support immigration and oppose the Republican anti-immigrant platform because it seems to me there is significant brain drain from many countries to the U.S. and that contributes to our success.
If it's brain-drain you want, the Republican party's immigration plan seems superior, actually. The previous Republican administration attempted to replace our current lottery-based legal immigration program with a meritocratic, point-based system, but was blocked by the Democrat-led house.
True, Republicans would reduce legal immigration and greatly reduce illegal immigration, but if your specific issue is bringing in brains, which seems like a better haul? 100,000 young, English-speaking, elite scientists, academics and professionals from around the world? Or two million randos picked out of a hat?
What is and isn't legal immigration is always a moving target. A majority of US history included open borders where it was legal for anyone to get off a boat, provide some basic info, and go on to try and make their way here.
The idea of closed borders, immigration caps, etc is relatively modern and driven more by the fact that social entitlement programs cost money than a fear of dangerous people coming here.
Agreed. That's where the question is really interesting, and important, though. If we can only have one or the other, and if a majority of Americans view our southern border as an untenable situation, can we maintain our entitlement programs?
Entitlement programs only work if we can secure our borders. If we can't secure our borders it seems to be clear that we can't have the entitlement programs.
Why are some societies worse off than others, to the point where someone would need to move countries take their entitlements? Might it have something to do with what the entitled countries did to the ones that are worse off?
Even if we accept this point as fact, which I think is maybe, partially true in some cases, it’s such a ridiculous argument. Do you think the average American is going to think that because their 3-10x generation ancestors, who might not even have existed in this country, might have been assholes to the 3-10x generation ancestors of these immigrants today, that they are now unable to have an opinion on how their government handles immigration and entitlements?
Black kids adopted by well-off White families remain lower IQ than White kids adopted by well-off White families. In a world that actually gave a shit about the truth this wouldn't be news to you
Your example would actually prove the negative here. Adopting a black kid into the white family did not change the kid's race.
Adoption only changes the kid's environment. How do you read that as an indicator that race was the differentiator?
Do you mean only race of the immediate family in the household, not race of the person taking the test? That seems like a stretch to say it's race based at that point, and also a pretty useless data point unless your recommendation is to somehow leverage that by adopting more kids into white families because your belief is that will make them score higher on an IQ test and that a higher IQ score is a meaningful enough metric to propose such a big intervention.
Correlation and causation are a very different thing.
I don't have a solid enough understanding of the research to say whether IQ scores are correlated with race, but it seems plausible enough to me. That is very different from saying races causes it though. To study such a thing you have to control for so many other environmental and economic factors that it's unrealistic to do. The population sizes would be too small, or you missed controls and the data is garbage.
I'd be very cautious reading anything into IQ results with no other context. An IQ test result is only a good metric of how a person compares to the rest of the population with regards to the specific types of questions and modalities in the IQ test.
An IQ result alone is pretty meaningless, especially if you haven't done te research to validate that the IQ test is a high quality predictor of twhstever you are using it as an analog for.
If you have reproducable research showing a link between the IQ test design and authoritarianism I'd be very interested to see it. I've never seen such a study, at least a study done with any scientific rigor.
IQ is good as an indicator, not a predictor. You can make assumptions that will likely be true on the basis of IQ, but there's very little that you can say for an absolute fact on that basis.
I think we're saying the same thing here. I'd argue IQ is correlated with the some outcome, but that it causal of few or none. Is that roughly what you're getting at too?
When IQ is indicative but not predictive, I just don't see much use there. If I can't predict future behavior, success, or some other metric then I'm not sure why I'd zero in in IQ specifically. I have also found past experience to be indicitive but not predictive, and I don't need to trust a standardized testing method to review experience.
I will agree based on anecdata alone. I have a high IQ, but have achieved much less than you might predict based on that IQ alone--primarily out of lack of desire.
Even though on paper I may be high-potential, in real life I'd prefer to be normal, and for every one of me that exists, there's a 100 IQ person who has the drive and willpower to achieve things that would be considered atypical. Both of us are exceptions, but we both still exist.
I don't know enough about the specific racial factors in our older immigration laws, I'll take your word for it, but there isn't anything linking the two. We could have open borders without entitlement programs or racist immigration laws.
You really put a lot of faith in IQ tests. What is it about IQ scores that makes you think it's worth so much that it should drive government policy and empower the federal government with the authority to do so?
> A majority of US history included open borders where it was legal for anyone to get off a boat, provide some basic info, and go on to try and make their way here.
Unless you were coming off a boat from Africa. Lets not forget that slavery defined a large section of American history.
I didn't say that anyone getting off a boat was doing it willingly. There are a ton of problems in US history related to slavery, not least of which how our founding fathers handled slavery while attempted to build a nation based on freedom and individual rights.
That's separate from the core topic here though. The slave trade and all the problems that go along with it do not change the fact that our borders were open for a majority of our history.
The FBI data also shows a 59% reduction in the U.S. property crime rate between 1993 and 2022, with big declines in the rates of burglary (-75%), larceny/theft (-54%) and motor vehicle theft (-53%).
Using the BJS statistics, the declines in the violent and property crime rates are even steeper than those captured in the FBI data. Per BJS, the U.S. violent and property crime rates each fell 71% between 1993 and 2022.
Of course the real reason for comments such as that above are that:
Americans tend to believe crime is up, even when official data shows it is down.
In 23 of 27 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least 60% of U.S. adults have said there is more crime nationally than there was the year before, despite the downward trend in crime rates during most of that period.
The only real uptick of note in recent years has been the murder rate in the US during the COVID years, staying home and feeling under threat led to an increase in US citizen on citizen crime - not immigration.
Of course those with a blinkered news bubble (Fox, et al) tend to believe the hyped up overstaing of every low occurrence incidence and clutch their pearls in response.
“The data says otherwise” in aggregate, up to the year 2022.
Posting aggregate stats just comes off iso a “gotcha” instead of a real discussion involving thought or context, both of which are needed in any discussion including data.
There’s many angles someone could take this.
You mentioned Fox News. They certainly don’t drone about crime in Little Rock — they complain about the “anarchist hellscape” of liberal cities (or whatever superlative they want to call it that hour). The worst of which? HN HQ San Francisco! (fwiw I love SF).
Unfortunately, in stark contrast to your stats, property crime has certainly gone up in San Francisco since 2012 [1]. SF is also a hot destination of migrant relocation busses [2], so is probably a city Fox mentions when it comes to migrant crime.
(Fwiw, Cubans often end up in liberal cities in conservative states, like Miami, Houston, Kentucky, not SF)[3].
Anyways, I have no horse in this race. I’m not really sure what my point is with this tangential response, other than to say your stats require context, and can just as easily factually be opposite to what you wrote, depending on that context.
Brain drain to the US helps the US, yes. The key word there is the brain. What doesn't help is taking in unskilled and manual laborers; that only creates downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on housing prices and other scarce resources, even before we get to any correlation with crime.
Countries with a highly successful immigration system, notably Canada, do it by being highly merit-based, for education and professional skills. The US hasn't put together any significant plan for that. Trump briefly tried proposing merit-based immigration in his first term, but it was quickly shot down with all the usual accusations of discrimination and so on. The US kinda unofficially does it via H1-B and O-1 visas, though that's only for employment and mostly not for permanent residence.
Canadian here, but not speaking on half of all Canadians.
We do have a highly successful immigration system, but don't have a highly successful infrastructure. There is a housing crisis.
The irony is I believe in the longer term Canada will face an immigrant shortage and not a housing crisis. As a born Canadian I am seeing less & less value to immigrating to Canada unless you're coming to employed as a Uber driver/Food delivery.
There is an important distinction between anti-immigration policies and anti-illegal immigration policies. I don’t know of many politicians who are against immigration of any kind. But there are plenty who are for doing something about the hundreds of thousands crossing the border illegally and/or abusing the asylum process. This isn’t even a partisan issue. Many of those opposed to fixing this problem did an immediate 180 the moment those illegal immigrants began being bussed to their city.
Fair point.
Everyone with education, practical skills and high iq is welcome legally. Any reasons why we need the rest? Especially crossing the borders illegally?
Most people are against border hooping illegal immigrant not legal immigrants. There’s a huge difference. For some reason the internet puts them in the same camp.
But you need the friction for the brain drain, otherwise it will just be anyone. Brain or no brain. I’m an immigrant and I can tell you that without the difficulties you’d just get people that would save enough to buy a ticket and land here and just “figure it out”. There is already lots of surplus in the retail area.
I’m convinced that the system expects a percentage of leakage by design as a strainer to keep the low effort migration out.
All fair points, however if we take everything you said at face value (which I mostly do, with some caveats) it does give give one pause to consider what a constant stream of new migrants means. It all sounds well and good to say that the problem is self correcting after a few generations, but if you are constantly "importing" new (1st generation) migrants, this lag-time becomes a serious issue quickly.
Isn't that the opposite of what the stats tell us? Immigrants are the most law-abiding Americans, and their descendants converge to typical amounts of lawlessness in 1 or 2 generations.
I'm for limited immigration but not how it is right now when there are millions entering the country each year and we're not building more homes to keep up with the new demand and we already have a housing crisis. Immigration should be orderly and law based.
Shutting off US immigration is national suicide. Immigration is our superpower. It’s like a company deciding they don’t want any more customers. Utterly beyond idiotic.
As birth rates drop globally the countries that are magnets for the highest quality immigrants will explode and basically rule the world.
The kind of immigrants we get are the envy of the world too. I am a little more sympathetic to European concerns because the immigrants they are getting are coming for different reasons. Many of them are refugees not people coming because they genuinely want to be there, and that is a different deal entirely.
The number of actual refugees in Europe is tiny (ukrainians excluded). What is large is the number of people who pretend to be refugees, like it is at the southern border of the US.
And even actual refugees are really economic migrants after they crossed half a dozen countries where they wouldn't be in danger.
It's sad and painfully ironic that the same escapees of the regime will almost exclusively vote for Republicans. Cubans are very similar to ex-Soviet expats in that regard, something I can speak to firsthand.
The GOP found a magic word to "unlock" these people. Say the word "socialism" and all logic centers immediately shut down. It is replaced by panic and fear. No data or common sense is helpful - ask them to choose between Democrats and We Are Going To Eat Your Babies Party, and they will ask what kind of condiments you would like for the baby.
I am only half-kidding. Alexander Vindman's father from Soviet Ukraine's Odesa, for example, was all in for Trump until only well into the process of seeing his son's career destroyed and threats received for telling the truth under oath. My own father, who had a very close brush with the KGB - is the same way.
They want to be authoritarian, they TELL them that this is what they want, musing about retribution, gulags, and "punishing" the enemies, and it's still not going through. They even showed just a taste of the cruelty by making migrant children orphaned. It's worse than the Soviet Union in that sense because repressions were a tool but sadism was not a public policy. Shit, even THEY left children alone.
It's just so amazing, but it also shows you the power of words, branding, and marketing.
> In fiscal year (FY) 2023 ERO arrested 73,822 noncitizens with criminal histories; this group had 290,178 associated charges and convictions with an average of four per individual. These included 33,209 assaults; 4,390 sex and sexual assaults; 7,520 weapons offenses; 1,713 charges or convictions for homicide; and 1,655 kidnapping offenses.
> In fiscal year (FY) 2023 ERO arrested 73,822 noncitizens with criminal histories; this group had 290,178 associated charges and convictions with an average of four per individual. These included 33,209 assaults; 4,390 sex and sexual assaults; 7,520 weapons offenses; 1,713 charges or convictions for homicide; and 1,655 kidnapping offenses.
I don't think the difference is European in nature, I think that immigrants 100 years ago have a totally different experience than today.
I can only speak to my family's history and that I saw growing up, but my great-grandfather was an immigrant from a Slavic region (to be technical, Poland didn't exist yet, but he was a Catholic who spoke Polish).
To make a long story short, none of his kids ever spoke Polish. That wasn't familial pressure, but the physical and emotional abuse inflicted on children in schools to beat the slav out of them if they acted or sounded "fresh off the boat" - to the point where four generations later, all of us know that phrase because it's been said to us one way or another.
Contrast this with the most recent wave of Polish immigration to the same neighborhoods almost 80 years later. These are kids I grew up with. They had Polish clubs in school, they went to "Polish school," they spoke the language fluently and publicly, and to a certain degree that was celebrated by the rest of the community. The external pressure not to be Polish is essentially gone.
I don't have a grand point here, it's just something I think about a lot in these debates. I learned what the experience of my ancestors was, and saw something of what happened to my peers, and the only difference was 100 years. It seems to me the difference between what we think of as assimilation is really how likely a community is to join the melting pot depending on the internal or external pressures on that community.
Yeah, fast changing demographics means fast changing values.People that come in mass from failing or disfunctional or just very different societies can and do bring with them "incompatible" values. Us modern ability to integrate / assimilate people in mass is probably ovverated, expecially in a fast paced mass migration scenario of a multiethnic society. the future is probably some version of Brazil
Usa got lucky integrating most europeans first and skilled immigrants later. but it struggled with other demographics, notably afro-americans, native americans
Additionally, just skimming the wiki page about Cuba's economy points out how false the embargo narrative is: Cubas top export partners are China, Spain, Netherlands, and Germany. Cuba's top import partners are: Spain, China, Italy, Canada, Brazil, and... The US.
It's ironic that there's a comment here supporting the misinformation about the embargo that points out how this state of affairs lasts because of manufacturing consent while it itself appears to be a result of manufacturing consents in the theme of "America Bad"
Relevant reminder that Cuba has been under a brutal economic embargo and sanctions regime by the US for decades, which is the primary driver of Cuba's economic situation. The sanctions began during an era of land reform that saw American corporations, such as United Fruit, lobbying the US to overthrow the Cuban government on their behalf. When that failed, the US imposed sanctions.
The problem commonly skated over is that two views cam be true at once. For example:
- the "Batista" regime was dictatorial and repressive. The people fought back with Castro. The first wave of people to land in Miami were essentially the moneyed class who lost everything. Unsurprisingly they hate the Castro regime and its descendents. The US government were happy to accommodate them under the guise of anti communism.
- the "Castro" regime is dictatorial and repressive. The people cant fight back so they leave. The people landing in Miami and their descendents hate the regime for taking everything. The US Republicans are happy to accommodate them under the guise of sticking it to the libs.
I dont see any of this changing until the regime changes in Cuba to a more democratic one simultaneously with the Republican party imploding in Florida. Which basically means not in my lifetime.
> the "Castro" regime is dictatorial and repressive.
As someone whose family comes from the former Soviet union, and has friends that come from other repressive places let me tell you that this really doesn't matter.
Economy and how you are doing are what matters in the day to day life of people.
People really don't think about the oppression or lack of elections, they care how much they need to suffer to put food on the table, whether they can afford vacations on the beach, how expensive it's gonna be, etc etc.
I consistently asked my grandparents and people from oppressive places whether they cared about politics and no they didn't.
They knew that people across the borders lived the same lives they did, but they could afford a better car and better vacations that's all.
The average Joe does not care about politics, even those who talk about it and share on social media don't care.
The amount of people that campaign, try to get elected, try to do anything even in their own neighborhood has always been low and probably never as low as now.
They may not care about the politics, but if the politics is what contributes to the economy / shortages / difficulty in getting things like food... then the politics matter, regardless of if any given citizen is consciously aware of it.
And as a reciprocal anecdote, I have family that grew up behind the iron curtain - and they were very much aware of and knew the importance of the governments politics
What can you do if you are effectively disenfranchised though? Either keep on keeping on or die in bloody revolution where there’s no certainty its not just a different oligarchy at the top when the dust settles.
Even the US suffers from this to an extent. Who the president is matters most for the people who make a lot of money from government contracts than you or I who broadly lead the same lives every presidency.
> Economy and how you are doing are what matters in the day to day life of people.
Very much so. Look at how people in Krasnodar started protesting after they lost power for 10 hours. After 2.5 years of Putin's war.
> The average Joe does not care about politics
Sadly, true. My parents blame everything on 'queer Westerners', while turning literally a blind eye to the torture of those who were against Putin. Might have a point though - my grandmother's family wouldn't have stayed alive if they weren't silent in the 1930s... she remembers how her building was 'purged' of mostly intelligentsiya.
My friends are oppressed and many can't return home. _I_ can't return home because my country will happily jail me for who I am, literally (I'm queer)
My country lost any chances of becoming a nice place to live for the next 100 years. AND IS THIS THE FUTURE MY FAMILY WANTED FOR ME?!!!.
I... I don't know what to feel anymore. I left the day after the war started. My friends turned refugees. Countless civilians dead. Bombed by my own country.
Sometimes I wish Russia was nuked out of existence, and I wish I was at the ground zero. Sometimes I wish Sun went nova and wiped any and all life because life is overrated and unnededed in this universe that was meant to be cold and lifeless forever.
The little man is told he has all the control but really he is along for the ride. The big man plots the course and convinces the little man their interests are shared when they may not be.
This is cynical thinking that causes corruption and incompetence to thrive. People have a say in their government but often refuse to use it for good. That's how bad leaders get into power.
Many countries continually elect smart and competent leaders and become prosperous, but some people have somehow convinced themselves that they have no say in politics, meaning they don't care when their system rots with horrible leadership.
This cynical thinking is what has ruined many third-world countries, and I hate to see it propagated.
That's the deal in the USofA at least; that has an antiquated first past the post systm that has ossified into a two party non representative standoff.
By comparison Australia has a relatively fresh preferential voting system based on a hybrid "Washminster" system that can see sitting heads of government (Prime Ministers) ousted and scrappy kids from housing estates rise to the head job.
No system is perfect. Some systems are less desirable than others. All systems need regular shaking out. No, that doesn't require guns (if sensibly designed as systems).
Even without fptp the system is rotten as its dependent on campaigning. My local mayor race was also "bad" in a sense. It started with like a dozen candidates which meant the vote was split between many people who had about the same sort of platform with little to distinguish them beyond a few instances of social media based muckraking perhaps, then there was the frontrunner supported by the democratic establishment and its donors and the closest competitor which was a self financed billionaire. These two went to a run off election in the fall and the democratic party endorsed candidate won, and practically it couldn't have happened any other way than that outcome.
Remove campaign financing by donors and ban advertising. Have the local election commission mail out policy positions of the various candidates funded by a small fee paid by these candidates (less than five thousand or so such that it isn't gate kept through wealth; most anyone can get that amount money on credit if they don't have it today). Then maybe we can consider the election process actually a little bit unbiased and not predetermined by monied interests.
Of course, people who benefit from donor financed campaigning and playing on emotion vs rational action would probably sooner compare this to the election system in Cuba, and it would never see the light of day.
Low level (small city mayors) campaigns tend to be a mess as there's often little public interest and much "vested" interest (concrete curb manufacturers want fat city contracts, etc).
Here we double down on honesty with punishment - campaign donations must be declared (with fines and potential jail if not), advertising is capped (max hours per medium) and tied to a person who vouches for the ad .. and can be held responsible for delibrate untruths, going for the family, etc.
It's similar but perhaps with stronger guiderails .. and like the US voting in "small" local elections isn't mandatory.
Voting in state and federal elections is compulsary - turning up to vote | mailing in a vote is mandatory - it's 100% OK to mail | hand in a blank vote, a pencilled in candidate, a rant against government, a crude drawing of dick and balls, etc.
That sorts out the "but I don't like any of the candidates" crowd and makes them easy to count - it also sorts out the problem of systemic disenfranchisement by making it hard for those who work on voting day, those who have insufficent booths in area, etc. The onus is on the system to ensure that everybody can vote - by mail, with time off, with available locations and short lines, etc.
This is a terrible example, the USSR deliberately ensured that people were uninformed and uninterested in politics as interest in politics is a huge security concern for an authoritarian state.
The really issue in democratic countries is that people are becoming complacent and passive in upholding and participing in democracy.
I find it amusing how you just don't get it. Your narrow worldview is typical of everyone who comes from oppressive regimes and doesn't understand citizenship. The writer Svetlana Alexievich wrote a lot about this kind of alienation.
> Economy and how you are doing are what matters in the day to day life of people.
Yeah, but "economy and how you are doing" is inseparable from freedom and democracy.
You need the rule of the law and respect for private property to ensure a functional economy. You need transparency, freedom of information and speech, freedom of assembly and political representation to demand responsible government from authorities.
> The average Joe does not care about politics
That's how Putin screws up the average Ilich, and the Castros screw up the average Juan. See the connection?
Again and again I've been arguing for access to information. Let Cuba land an underwater cable in Miami. Ever since I was young I was fed this line 'Glasnost helped accelerate the collapse of the Soviet Union, people wanted things their government wouldn't give them... free access to information not filtered by their government', but the US argues for some reason that Cubans can't have this.
Is it fear of an even bigger migration? Why? Is it expat Cubans looking to kick out the ladder?
Cubans have fairly free access to the internet through mobile phones and VPN.
So it’s not like cut off or anything just internet is really slow and expensive.
But you can get a “download” of many sites including popular YouTube/Netflix etc from a neighbourhood dealer.
I agree with you, but if Cuba wants better Internet access there's nothing stopping them from landing an underwater cable in Mexico. It's about the same distance.
Except Mexican government has a relationship with the US government and if US says 'don't do this' to Mexico there's not much upside to them going through with it.
Also maybe consider this? A substantial amount of news/rhetoric in the US revolves around US/Mexico border problems. Do you think Cuban expats want Cuba to be associated with Mexico in any way?
Russians didn't give two shits about "free access to information", they cared to see that people in US lived richer lives that's it.
Russians in Soviet union had to illegally trade and commit felonies to get their hands on some Italian mortadella. They had to go through insane lengths to buy a new tv.
It wasn't glasnost but the oil crisis that ultimately killed the SU's economy and made people think that in democracy it was gonna be better.
Is it better? In absolute terms, yes, but so is virtually everyone in the world compared to 1989.
In terms of gdp per capita Soviet russia was 33rd in the world in that year. Modern Russia is 52nd.
But you wouldn't be able to say that such a massive decline happened when modern Russia is far cleaner, richer and very low unemployment.
Modern Russians are richer in absolute terms, but poorer in relative ones.
> In terms of gdp per capita Soviet russia was 33rd in the world in that year. Modern Russia is 52nd.
GDP was also calculated based upon prices in a free market. The problem being, if you don't have a free market, you don't have an efficient way of knowing if the "value" of the goods produced actually mattered. The Soviet Union massively overproduced goods that nobody wanted, as this was efficient for production. But in terms of quality of life, it didn't matter. Overabundances and shortages were the norm.
GDP calculations for the Soviet Union were bullshit and not to be relied upon. The numbers were heavily manipulated, and much of the country ran on a command economy where money didn't even mean much because you couldn't buy things with it.
It's interesting reading the opinions in the comments on this thread. As a non-US person, I don't have a strong opinion on Cuba. I'd like to visit someday but don't know much about it other than the headlines. Reading the comments here it sounds like a pariah state on the level of North Korea. With 1m people leaving in a year, it clearly has its issues - but lots of the comments here are a good example of how your country's media and propaganda can significantly colour your opinions. I don't get the feeling many other countries continue to have such a negative opinion of Cuba.
Are there any countries other than the US that has a strong negative opinion on Cuba?
I'm also curious if anyone comes from a country that has a significant negative opinion on another country that others might find surprising?
> Reading the comments here it sounds like a pariah state on the level of North Korea.
The only reason it's NOT North Korea is the fact that it "allows" its people to flee to the United States, where by law they may become American citizens.
Cuba has extremely effective propaganda - folks forget that it's actually a dictatorship which severely limits freedom of speech and brutally cracks down on protest. Wikipedia has a great page "Foreign interventions by Cuba."
Not all that much worse than China, but with the misfortune of bordering the US and not being powerful enough to stand without access to regional trade.
Comparing Cuba to North Korea makes no sense at all. You could compare it to the USSR or East Germany, but not North Korea.
North Korea is effectively a caricature of a totalitarian state, ruled by a cartoon villain. Cuba is more like an ordinary country unlucky enough to have a totalitarian government. There are plenty of equally bad countries in the world even today.
For the most part, the only Americans that really care enough about Cuba to form a negative opinion are Cuban immigrants and their descendants. They happen to be a powerful voting block in Florida, a swing state, so they have an outsized effect on national politics.
If not for them, the embargo would have been dropped years ago and relations would have been normalized.
The US has by far the world’s largest ex-Cuban population (well over 1M people). Those communities are a big part of what shapes US perceptions and policy toward Cuba.
That's a fair point. One thing I will say, having lived near many in FL at one time, they are some of the most patriotic and pro USA people. I always appreciated that in a way, as I think a lot of us take it for granted.
The world would be a quite different place if the majority of people in each country made rational choices for their own good. I don't think we should single out Cubans for that
The unmotivated masses tend to follow the de-facto system that entrenches the successful few. The remaining motivated and competitive people on the other hand leave for better pastures.
People who emigrate from countries whose governments micromanage the population tend to have the worst opinion about them. Not that dissimilar from people who ditch bosses who micromanage =).
The world would be a quite different place if the majority of people in each country made rational choices for their own good. I don't think we should single out Cubans for that
Maybe it used to be, probably because the Castro and Guevara rebellion is a great story. But today I feel that everyone knows that it backfired and the country is in shambles due to terrible totalitarian leaders.
As a canadian its pretty weird. Normally we get all the same media as usa and have relatively similar opinions. However cuba has always been much more popular here and is a common tourist destination. Its sad they are having problems.
Most Americans don’t think about Cuba at all, and it definitely isn’t in the news very much (as far as I know, I cut most TV years ago). However, there are lots of Batista supporters and their descendants in Florida. They are politically influential given Florida is an important swing state.
Cubans leaving Cuba today are taking advantage of immigration openness that anti-Cuba policies pushed for. Why would they not take advantage of that? They are literally the only refugees who can come to America and get automatic asylum. Why does that exist? Political power from Florida stemming from Batista supporters.
I don’t have any interest in this argument, but the situation between America and Cuba is fairly artificial and politically related.
> With 1m people leaving in a year, it clearly has its issues - but lots of the comments here are a good example of how your country's media and propaganda can significantly colour your opinions.
What? 10% of a country leaving in one year tells you what Cubans think of Cuba. That's not propaganda, that's fact. On the contrary, it seems like you have some kind of preconceived notion of that life in Cuba is in fact not that bad (poor but laid back perhaps?), but if that were true people would not leave would they?
Fact is populations will leave if they see chance at a better life elsewhere, even if they aren't living in an active warzone or under some some government the US doesn't like.
> moving to a different country with a different language.
The US doesn't have an official language, there are areas that speak almost exclusively spanish. All government shit is available in spanish. Puerto Rico speaks spanish. Over a fifth of Floridians speak spanish at home.
Things are not so simple as Cuba bad, USA good. Wage differentials easily explain why so many come to the USA. Maybe they like Cuba but cannot come for better wages. Cuba has its problems, but definitely the USA/cia is targeting the regime with negative publicity. Who knows maybe you work at a cia troll farm.
People who leave a country tend to leave it for a reason. If they liked their life in Cuba presumably they would have stayed. They are probably not a neutral source on Cuba.
On German media (including heavy left leaning Taz) you find various reports about human right issues in Cuba. It's a typical socialist dictatorship doomed to fail as its predecessors.
> Most of those migrants have come to the United States in what experts call the most significant migration wave in Cuban history.
With the destabilization that a population drop of 10% has, the potential for more migration in the long term and the associated costs... Wouldn't it make sense for the U.S. to invest and help Cuba? It would also have the additional benefit of maybe depriving Russia of an ally.
Change is the hardest part of changing US policy towards Cuba because the legal and regulatory elements are old and thus deeply baked in to ongoing operations. Potential alignment of Cuba for other adversaries isn’t a serious enough threat nor engagement a sufficient benefit to overcome government inertia. Cuba isn’t as much of a mess as Haiti and also isn’t a tiny success like Singapore.
Here is hoping that Cuba will be able to help itself out of a perhaps weakening despotism but the default hypothesis is not to hold one’s breath.
That stopped being true 70 years ago, and it was the withdrawal of American aid that brought Castro to power (he still pretended to care about human rights then).
"Aid" is a bit of an understatement considering that Castro was fighting against the US-and mafia-backed dictator (Fulgencio Batista). The withdrawal of American support to Batista happened because the corruption and violence had reached unsustainable levels even for an anti-communist.
People make this argument - but it’s consistent through history with moderates as well as non-moderate government. Withdrawing support is always seen as weakness an established state and leads radicals to overthrow governments. Germany 1931(bankers withdrew funds), Afghanistan, Cuba, Vietnam.
The current U.S. position towards Cuba continues to puzzle me. Their geopolitical stance is nowhere near being on the same level as North Korea or Iran. Given Cuba's proximity and relative productive capacity you'd think that we'd be easy allies if only they hadn't upset a bunch of dead politicians 60 years ago.
While Florida was/is a swing state in US elections, whoever secures the ex-Cuban vote wins a massive amount of electoral votes. Republicans are fine jockeying against Cuba "because communism", and so the Democrats are in a pickle in that the right thing to do would be to improve relations with Cuba but it guarantees to hand Florida over to the Republicans who will then have the presidency and proceed to treat Cuba as-is.
If Florida remains reliably Republican anyway, it's possible the Democrats may get enough electoral support from the rest of the country to still win future presidencies and ease up on Cuba without caring about the Florida ex-Cuban vote.
Yeah, this is basically the answer- Cuban American lobby is solidly against the current regime. Less so than they used to be, but there are still plenty of voices strongly opposed to normalization and few strongly for it.
Without a strong counter vailing lobby there is little reason for politicians to risk alienating the Cuban bloc to normalize relations with a fairly repressive government that still remains broadly anti-American and opposed to US interests.
Cubans who emigrate vote relatively conservatively, so perhaps it’s in the interest of the Democratic Party to make it more attractive to stay if most existing anti-Cuba Floridians are not marginal/swing voters.
Their government is hostile like a friend’s chihuahua. It will make it known it doesn’t like you, but it ain’t going to do anything about it because it can’t.
The people on the other hand are truly wonderful human beings that would love to be able to have visitors or visit other countries themselves.
Who cares if some politicians feelings get hurt. People want to be free to do what they want in a supposedly free country.
If you open up trade they will become stronger. Look at China before and after we opened up trade with them. What happens of Cuba becomes more powerful and is still hostile while being so close to the US?
The US should oppose expansionist dictatorships that attempt to alter the status quo via forceful revisionism. That's Russia in Ukraine and China in Asia.
I don't see how opposing Cuba achieves anything in the US interests.
Cuba was in the "attempt to alter the status quo via forceful revisionism" club. They had literally thousands of soldiers and "advisors" in various hot spots, trying to export the revolution.
That was the 1970s, though. Cuba was allegedly involved in the coup in Venezuela in 1992; arguably, the chavismo government would not have happened without Cuban involvement. That government still rules Venezuela.
Are they still trying to stir up trouble? If not, how long ago did they stop? I don't know. But there definitely were reasons to impose sanctions on Cuba.
I keep seeing this "expansionist dictatorship" applied to China when the USA is discussed. The USA has invaded plenty of countries in the last few decades, has a history of colonialism (Cuba, Philippines, Puerto Rico...sure, less than some European countries, but still).
Which countries has China invaded in the past few decades?
Did you say "last few decades" to conveniently exclude their invasion of Vietnam? Not that it matters. Policy should not be made based on a naive extrapolation of historical track record. Culture, interests and leadership are all things that change over time.
Their publicly broadcasted intention is to change the status quo, forcefully if needed. That's a euphemism for invading Taiwan. They keep saying it, over and over. Beyond that, there's a militarism, nationalism and irredentism that permeates Xi's leadership and the culture he has created in his country, which did not exist to the same extent under Deng. The confluence of such factors have historically been a bad omen.
This does not mean that the US should start a war with China. It means the US should pivot its focus to Asia and continue the policy of containment, which is a maintenance of the peaceful status quo through a combination of sticks and carrots. It means the US should be aware that there is a rival there who may start a war on their own terms and on their own schedule when they believe they are capable of defeating the US.
Since WWII
Tibet (annexed)
Korea (at invitation of the North Korean government, but invaded South Korea)
India
USSR
Vietnam
China has been fairly quiet and well behaved since 1980, but it is current quite publicly talking forcefully reintegrating Taiwan and has had continuous naval disputes in the South China Sea.
If we are talking about colonialism, “China” is a land empire that has absolutely dominated its neighbors and often conquered them. Making an apples to apples comparison to European colonialism isn’t very useful and I don’t pretend to know details, but historical China has plenty of expansionist and domineering episodes.
Current position is easily explained; most active US voters are >50 yo and elect 50+ year old pols.
All of those 50+ year olds were weened on “Cuba bad.”
Leadership is mostly ossified and low effort adults who rarely update their opinion; they just engage in their routine, recite the spoken pageantry, idle about like brain dead tourists of reality and die down the road.
Murican Civic Life has taken hold of the same biology religion stumbled upon. Time to “blink” and accept physical statistics just keeps enough stuff on shelves the majority don’t riot and mv /human/story/mode /dev/null
Not a single mention in these comments of the US Embargo against Cuba. I’m sure Cuba has problems that are not directly because of the Embargo, but the Embargo makes dealing with all
other problems much more difficult. Until the Embargo is lifted, I don’t see why people expect good outcomes for Cubans.
Agree, although that expectation is a result of manufactured consent entirely consistent with imperialist logic - downplay the major factors (because you are their instigator) then blame the victim for their predicament.
This plus low fertility rates paint a bleak demographic picture. What happens to a country whose population collapses? I don't think we have past data to reference here?
Perhaps OP means the Cuban Americans who fled before are generally pretty right wing - which is why they were persecuted by far left regime of Castro in the first place- will likely vote for Trump.
It is also perhaps possible that those citizens don't like the new wave of immigrants, it is not uncommon for groups to try and raise the ladder behind them so to speak. A surprisingly large percentage immigrants are anti-immigration .
I mean when there is mass embargoes against your country so much so that normal everyday things we take for grated are hard to get things can become tough.
But we could also just say "lamo commy dont werk" without understanding the geopolitical reasons for why a country might be struggling.
Why are we continuing the arguments of dead people? “…but my dad fought against communism blah blah blah”
All forms of government suck because nobody has figured out how to keep power hungry sociopaths from taking government and financial power in any form of government thus far in human history.
Markets / trade have always been the best treatment because the moment the sociopath of the day tries to pull the plug on all their citizen’s businesses, they get their heads on a spike. It forces the hand of the sociopaths in charge to comply with the will of people and find a compromise between their own hurt feelings from the neighboring sociopath across the border that called their mom fat or whatever, and the demands of their citizens…usually.
In this case, the US sociopaths have realized they continue to be butthurt by the little neighbor because not enough people are complaining. When Obama tried to briefly open up this pathway, the Cuban govt was quick to agree to allow American tourism. Didn’t last long of course.
Cuba's economy is not doing well because of the illegitimate and illegal US embargo. End the blockade. Take Cuba off the completely farcical State Sponsors of Terror list. Let Cuba live!
Cuba developed its own COVID vaccine but couldn't give it to its own people because they could not buy metal for syringes. Its fucking crazy.
Is it the embargo that prohibits fishermen in Cuba from fishing, farmers from harvesting, cubans from freely doing business? Is it also responsible for cubans getting beaten and imprisoned for thinking differently? Was it the embargo that destroyed every sugar mill in the country, textile factory, shoe factory, you name it?… The dictatorship is the one responsible for all these things.
CIA-backed groups in Miami were bombing Cuban hotels in the 1990s. They were bombing Cuban passenger airlines, killing many civilians. They were burning sugar fields. Of course there was also the Bay of Pigs invasion, the theft of Guantanamo harbor etc.
There is no blockade, and there hasn't been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. An embargo prohibits US citizens and US-owned businesses from trading with Cuba. A blockade would be the US Navy preventing anyone else's ships from entering Cuba to trade.
Cuba is poor because Cuba is Communist. The US is not the only trading partner in the world, but a country has to have something to trade in order to engage in trade, and Cuba has nothing.
Is Cuba even that poor, though, compared to its Latin American peers, and is communism the reason?
Aside from the recent weirdness with their GDP spike in World Bank's numbers, Cuba's GDP per capita is basically the same as Mexico's, and it's higher than Brazil's, neither of which are communist.
Furthermore, aside from raw GDP numbers it's higher in the UN Human Development Index rankings[1] than Brazil and Colombia along with a slew of other very capitalist countries.
If you make apples to oranges comparisons in demographics, you can make any country look bad. The UK is basically Mississippi if you take out London. The US also fares poorly if you don't count the wealthiest 15% of the population. The median Cuban isn't well off, but they aren't wildly different from others in their region.
> The US also fares poorly if you don't count the wealthiest 15% of the population.
This is false. The US has the third highest median income of any country in the world, after Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates (which clearly does not count the income of their foreign slaves). PPP adjusted, btw.
GDP/Capita isn't median income (it should roughly correspond to mean income); many of the higher GDP/capita are also higher inequality and so lower median is quite possible.
Okay, I already ceded that point anyway. The overall point that you can cherry pick to make any country look bad in one way or another stands, however.
Illegitimate and illegal according to what authority? Unless you believe in God, there is no higher authority than the US government and its military might.
That said, i don't think sanctions violate intl law. You are under no obligation to trade with people you dont like. A blockade probably would be (generally blockades are an act of war which is only allowed in defense or if un security council approves) however america isnt blockading it.
International law isn't real. You can tell it's not real because if it were real there would be real repercussions for violating it. There aren't, so it isn't. It's just words made up for politicking and persuasion.
There is absolutely no doubt that the Cuban economy is suffering through a severe crisis. However, mass emigration offers some benefits to the Communist regime. Many of the migrants who work in the USA send money back to their families in Cuba in the form of remittances, which provide valuable foreign exchange reserves to help pay for essential imports. Moreover, emigration provides an escape for those people who might otherwise form a potentially powerful class of under-employed and politically discontent civilians. If Cuba’s emigrants were still living on the island, then the Communist regime would have good reason to worry about a mass revolution, as shown by the experience of the Arab Spring, when authoritarian governments in Syria, Libya and Egypt, each struggling with rising demographic pressures and economic stagnation, were destabilized by popular rebellion. The Communist elite is certainly aware of the dangers to its regime from a potential “Cuban Spring,” and thus likely regards mass emigration as a welcome alternative, despite the obvious social liabilities of losing so much human capital.
Ha. You should go to Cuba. They are as clever as any other group of humans and they all have family in Florida.
I’m sure you can’t just wire the money from a US bank to a Cuban one, but they surely have ways to do it. The island is full of stuff from America they aren’t supposed to have.
According to the Western Union website, the company "is resuming its money transfer service between the U.S. and Cuba. Following the tightening of laws by the U.S. government in 2020, services had to be suspended leaving those wishing to send money to Cuba from USA with limited and expensive options. Now that some restrictions have been lifted, Western Union is gradually bringing back limited money transfer services from the U.S. to Cuba."
As a Miami native, I can tell you for a fact Cuban remittances do indeed happen. The sanctions loosened after the Obama admin d'tente even after the Trump admin restored most of the controls. My alma matter https://cri.fiu.edu/cuban-america/remittance/ has a continued focus of research to see how much flows go back to island nation.
Anyway tl;dr is that Cubans use: https://havanaship.net/nueva-agencia-de-remesas-a-cuba-orbit, which is a gov't controlled remittance operator. As of commenting isn't on the OFAC controlled entity list. It used to be sanctioned after the previous remittance operator was associated with the Cuban Army but is now in compliance.
If I were Xi Jinping, I’d step in quite heavily at this point. A few billions in investment would do wonders there. I’m sure a hypersonic nuke base could also be negotiated in return.
I think he’d much rather have a permanent and painful boil on America’s ass, like what the US has in Taiwan. Mexico isn’t cooperating, so maybe Cuba will. There’s precedent for that kind of thing, as well as for US military getting its ass handed to it while trying to “subjugate” Cuba.
Thankfully even CcP authoritarians have more sense than this. China is and will continue to foment unrest in South America to play the same role, but after watching china rape Africa’s resources for the last decade, they are far less likely to capitulate.
The arguments in favor of immigration are usually economical, but the resultant demographic change is a major force of disruption in our societies and the cause of many current social problems. My home state of California is an radically different place now than when I grew up only a few decades ago because of demographic change caused by immigration.
The question needs to be asked "How much do you want your nation to change?" in exchange for the alleged economic benefits. Blaming the social problems caused by immigration on citizens because of "xenophobia" when they never wanted mass immigration in the first place is the height of arrogance. The pro-immigration people want the economic benefits of immigration while shifting the blame for the inevitable social problems on the poor citizens who are often victims of these social problems. It's sick.
I really want people to understand that a sterile term like "economic sanctions" really means "starving them to death". It's not just food. It's the infrastructure necessary to grow food and to have clean drinking water. It's basic medicines, life-saving stuff.
What we, as a country, have done and continue to do to Cuba is absolutely unconscionable.
It affects us too. Over the last 60+ years there have hundreds of thousands or even millions of Cuban migrants to the US. This [1] claims 2.7 million but includes US-born descendants. Cuban migrants aren't a random sample of Cubans. They skew very much anti-Castro, which means by extension they skew very pro-Batista. Definitely right-leaning or even pro-fascist [2[.
Importing fascist or fascist adjacent people who ultimately became voters has changed US politics where Florida is now a safely red state. Here's more on the demographics of Cubans in Miami in particular [3].
I find it interesting how this aspect of immigration is so often missed or glossed over.
There is absolutely no justification for continuing 60+ years of sanctions just because our puppet was deposed.
> There is absolutely no justification for continuing 60+ years of sanctions just because our puppet was deposed.
Two weeks ago Russia landed an armada there in a show of force right off the US coast. It’s not an easy black and white situation where you can just say “USA bad.”
It is, though. If US did not sanction Cuba, there very much would be no Russian visit. When US decides you are an enemy, you don't get to pick your friends.
The UN, UK, and EU have no sanctions imposed on Cuba [1]. Why has no other country prevented Cuba from "starving to death?" Honest question. Is the United States so powerful that our trade is the only thing keeping countries alive?
Secondary sanctions. If your company trades with Cuba, then companies that want to trade with the US also violate the sanctions by trading with you.
So even something as basic as opening a bank account in such circumstances isn't possible, as no bank will cut themselves off from the entire worldwide banking system just to provide you an account.
It's a complex issue, for sure, and I admit to not being well informed. I did a quick search, and Biden's administration allowed Cubans to open accounts with U.S. banks, but the Cuban government does not like giving up control. Cuba passed laws "forcing businesses to use Cuban banks for payment" [1].
This is wrong. There are no secondary sanctions against Cuba.
Cuba is poor because Cuba is Communist. They can trade with everyone except the United States, if they had anything to trade with.
The US sanctions do serve as a wonderful excuse for the Cuban government to blame the poverty they inflict upon their own citizens on the United States. Plenty of gullible people outside the country fall for it as well.
The EU passed a statue (No 2271/96) in 1996 that blunted the US' ability to sanction EU companies for trading with Cuba.
The statue gives EU companies the ability to recover damages caused by the Helms-Burton Act. They even threatened to counter-sanction US companies making Title III complaints.
The result of multiple countries passing similar blocking statues was that the Helms-Burton Act had been suspended by every President from 1996 until 2019 when Trump decided to reactivate it.
According to an EU report on the statue, there have been threats of US legal action, but no mention of any EU company has actually been sanctioned.
> The UN, UK, and EU have no sanctions imposed on Cuba
The US is the 800 pound gorilla in the room here. The US is 90 miles off the coast of Cuba. Cuba once supplied cane sugar to the US. Now we can't of course because it might hurt the corn lobby.
Imagine if the EU imposed sanctions on the UK, an island nation just off its coast. You could say "the US is free to trade with the UK" and you'd be correct but do you think for a second it wouldn't be massively damaging to the UK economy?
> Importing fascist or fascist adjacent people who ultimately became voters has changed US politics where Florida is now a safely red state.
And on the flip side, importing Central and South Americans who are socialist or socialist adjacent and ultimately become voters has changed US politics where California and other states are now safely blue.
> I find it interesting how this aspect of immigration is so often missed or glossed over^W^W^W^Wdismissed as a right wing conspiracy theory.
> And on the flip side, importing Central and South Americans
Which countries are those, exactly? I"ll refer you to:
- "South American Immigrants in the United States" [1];
- "Hispanics and Latinos in California" [2].
Now California's single largest ethnicity is Hispanic. Nearly all are of Mexican descent. They're underrepresented in voting though where the typical California voter is still older and white [3].
We have Venezuelan refugees now. Their government is ostensibly socialist. So Venezuelan refugees have similar leanings to Cuban immigrants.
Colombians are a large group there. One exit poll suggested roughly half voted for Trump in 2020 [4].
The point is that the Latino and Hispanic vote is complicated and certainly not monolithic.
