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.
