“Calling the children “natives” doesn’t change the fact that they are an expense that only arose because their parents were allowed into the country in the first place”
Bingo. A couple of decades or so ago, I saw the CA stat’s for immigrants wrt to their current wages as low level manual laborers and the estimated expense of just two of their children attending public school in CA, K-12. Two children attending public school for 12 years was projected at that time to cost $300k and that was not including inflation projections. The typical (low) household income was well below any conceivable tax rate able to recoup such a taxpayer footed expense across even a lifetime of menial wage household income.
The knock on (beneficial) effects of such immigration is little more than wishful thinking. As “Realist” has succinctly noted, cost in $$$ pales to cost in IQ dilution of the nation. Those costs will live on forever and be subtly hidden.
I’ll reply with a simple stat you could have looked up, had you desired to fact check rather than state an unsupported emotional assertion:
From ChatGPT:
”… -The 2025–26 state budget allocates roughly $118.9 billion under Proposition 98 just for K–12, which translates to:
-Approximately $18,918 per pupil from those state funds,
-And about $24,764 per pupil when federal and additional state funding are included”
Do the math.
A single child over 13 years schooling today costs in excess of $300k. 2 children, $600k
The median household income for CA in 2023 was $95k, the average tax rate for State income and sales is about 9%. So a household at best seems to contribute $8,500.
There is no way an IA family that drops, two kids of is gonna be a net asset and they ain’t raising no Einsteins—in the main.
I could respond more in depth to your response, but have learned folk like yourself are not subject to rationale thought and my time is limited.
Why? Be specific. You suspect ChatGPT is returning inaccurate facts? Do you think ChatGPT played an essential part of the meaning intended by my comment, rather than simply support my opinion?
Do you use ChatGPT? The facts I’ve quoted from ChatGPT are a summation/interpretation of which there are included (by ChatGPT) several *dozen* citations from various sources it used—Census Bureau, Wikipedia, several insurance companies, financial publications, etc. I used it only for numbers I have a recollection of in order to obtain a current update of my memory from a couple of decades ago.
Had ChatGPT disagreed with what I originally posted, I’d have retracted my (challenged) comment. If I had to examine each and every source used by ChatGPT to generate basic stat’s, there would be no commentary possible due to the immensity of the effort. If I failed to use ChatGPT, or any citations, to support my argument, then I’d simply be spouting gratuitous assertions as most folk seem to do in commentary these days.
Obviously, you are new at this. So you feel “insulted” by words directed to someone else. You need to grow a pair if you want to survive in this world of commentary and opinion back and forth. In any event, there was no insult until the repeated challenge to supported commentary with more gratuitous assertions. Long experience has shown there will be no meeting of minds with such folk, but also that they will never, ever, allow themselves *not* to have the last word. So the commentary simply becomes wasted effort.
As to your citation, that is a problem—but it is a problem that is at least several decades old and not originally an AI problem. AI has simply perfected/elevated it. Years ago we required students to submit essays to “Turnitin”. Plagiarism being rampant even then. AI is just making it harder to detect, but it can be detected, or at least suspected if you are savvy enough. Problem is one of time for lazy faculty.
Total nonsense not supported by the stat’s. If you want to cite make believe facts and figures, from biased “not for profits”, I can as well. All are made up estimates and as such gratuitous assertions. Given your stat’s, we should pay for even more illegals to come into the USA and drop children. Why, there’d be no end to how we’d all profit. Grow up. This country cannot absorb 15-20M IA’s as well as the legal 5M that came in during the Biden years.
The typical IA comes from a country where he scraped the ground with a stick to survive. No skill sets to make a living in a 1st world technological society. All the benefits you cite can be easily refuted with an analysis of the welfare implications of such low skilled individuals. Take for example the ever growing costs of tax payer health care for these individuals at the lowest economic ranks. Here we’ve had to practically double Medicaid in just the last few years because of such influx.
No thanks, I’ll mow my lawn myself and be better off for it.
And heck, we’ve not even spoken about the demographic and societal changes these people bring with them as they flood society. For one, these IA’s reduce the wages of those legally seeking manual labor employment—and that’s really the basis for their admission, low wage (slave) labor for the large corporations and fat cats. Cheap housing has all but dried up—hard to compete with IA’s living six to a room. The rest of us still working pay the price in taxes and disrupted communities.
There is not a single race specified in my commentary.
WRT Indians, I worked extensively with such in University settings. All were wonderful people, highly intelligent, and sought after as faculty and grad students. However, that may or may not be a reason for them, or rather their less endowed countrymen, to be freely admitted as residents.
Like it or not, culture is downstream from race, which is downstream from biology. This country was not founded by Indians, rather Northern Europeans. Until the 1960’s we were a White, European nation. The concept of a melting pot worked quite well with those peoples. Today, not so much.
But you are correct in one thing, open borders and the welfare State are incompatible. BTW, I was a card carrying Libertarian for 20+ years—even knew David Nolan here. However, I grew up when I became a Race Realist.
Indian crime rates typically aren't high, but that could be due to any combination of culture and genetics. (Also, nepotism seems to be a major problem in specific industries.)
Bryan Caplan and Richard Hanania like to see themselves as "scientists" in opposition to the irrational yahoos on the other side. A true scientist, however, first tests a new proposal on a small sample of consenting participants. The requirement of "consent" is critical. If there is no consent, the experiment cannot go ahead.
If the results are promising, a true scientist will then try to replicate the results with a larger sample. If the results are still good, the proposal is tentatively accepted — although it is still subject to review and criticism. In fact, criticism is always encouraged.
This approach has little in common with what people like Bryan Caplan and Richard Hanania are advocating. Where is the consent? Where is the preliminary testing on a small scale? And where is the freedom to criticize?
Consent is an ethical obligation. It has no bearing on the scientific quality of a study. It would be possible to coerce the participation of unwilling human subjects (or, better, indifferent to whether they participated voluntarily or by coercion or even without their knowledge) in a superbly designed randomized double-blinded clinical trial ("experiment".) This would be good science, because it would probably answer the question being tested, even though it was bad ethics. The university's institutional review board would not let the study go ahead.
The research Caplan and Hanania are discussing is non-experimental research where the data already exist and just have to be examined and analyzed retrospectively. Criminal offences committed by immigrants compared with the native-born would be an example. There is no need to obtain consent from the people whose data are being analyzed unless you need access to their names and personal information, which you usually don't.
I think you are confusing these types of research: prospective experiments and retrospective data analysis.
In both types of research, the researchers should work out, *during the conception and design of the study*, using statistical power computation the number of people they need to study, in order to have a good chance of detecting the effect they are looking for, if it exists. There is no basis for "underpowering" a study. That just wastes resources. If you know you need 1000 subjects, budget your project to study 1000 subjects. Nothing is gained by studying 50 first. (If it's a medical treatment that you worry might have toxic side effects, then you may want to study a small number first to make sure the treatment is not too dangerous to inflict on larger numbers, but that's a different question.)
"The research Caplan and Hanania are discussing is non-experimental research where the data already exist and just have to be examined and analyzed retrospectively."
The data cannot be analyzed retrospectively because the experiment hasn't been completed. Of course, the preliminary findings don't seem very promising, but Caplan and Hanania will insist that we stay the course and pursue the experiment to its bitter end.
It's like Hitler in his bunker. It's impossible to tell such people that things aren't going to plan. They'll just get angry at you.
There's no experiment. There is observation of data emerging as they come. Have you never done retrospective research, or any research to know when you are doing an experiment and when you are observing natural evolution? There may be others doing what you see as social "experiments" but Caplan and Hanania don't have their hands on the levers of power that run these "experiments" and decide when to end them?
I invoke Godwin's law and advise you to stop. You are sounding more than a little paranoid, and I doubt if you have ever done any science.
It's not paranoia to say that Bryan Caplan is a major player in current policy making. Richard Hanania is a minor player, but the same cannot be said for his employer, the Cato Institute.
Nor is it paranoia to say that their political advocacy has real-life consequences. They themselves say as much. In fact, they would feel more insulted if I told them that their advocacy is inconsequential.
So, no, it doesn't bother me in the least to call them out. And I will not cease to do so.
Libertarianism, like all ideologies, is a simplification of reality. It assumes that a free market economy will self-generate as long as government gets out of the way. Unfortunately, this assumption is just that — an assumption. Markets have existed throughout history and prehistory in most societies. It is only in a handful of high-trust societies, however, that markets have evolved into a true market economy.
A high-trust society, like a market economy, will not self-generate unless the population has: 1) a high level of cognitive ability; 2) a low propensity for settling disputes through violence; 3) a low level of time preference (i.e., willingness to accept present pain for future gain); 4) a high level of guilt proneness (i.e., feelings of guilt when you break a rule even if the rule-breaking is not witnessed by anyone else); and 5) a high level of empathy (i.e., a desire to help others and not hurt them because you have internalized their pain).
These qualities prevail in only a handful of societies. And those societies are responsible for most of the economic activity in this world.
Mass migration is not wrong because a growing proportion of migrants are "unskilled" or "uneducated." Yes, a modern economy needs people who are numerate, literate, and capable of planning. But you won't get them by ensuring they all have a college degree. Even in Western societies, a college degree only ensures a mean IQ of about 100. In other societies, even that threshold is not met because you can earn a degree at a "degree mill." Or you can buy one.
But let's assume we can force all migrants to take an IQ test and let in only those with an IQ of at least 100. You're still not ensuring they have the other qualities that are needed for a high-trust society, i.e., low propensity for violence, low time preference, guilt proneness, empathy, etc.
Only a minority of human populations have all of those requisite qualities. Sure, you can still create a semblance of a high-rust society through police state methods: video surveillance, internment and deportation of suspected criminals without the benefit of trial, etc. That's how they do things in Dubai, and I suspect that's the way Western societies are going. But it's not exactly libertarian.
I agree. Cognitive ability is not the main reason why a true market economy cannot develop in South Asia. The main reason is the low level of trust. People prefer to make money with close relatives, while keeping everyone else at a safe distance. As a result, the market principle cannot replace kinship as the main organizing principle of society.
South Asians will inevitably act in ways that seem "irrational" in terms of market economics. Again, the problem isn't intelligence or lack of intelligence. The problem is that you cannot have a true market economy without a high level of trust in people who are neither close relatives nor longstanding friends.
Human populations differ in many mental and behavioral traits, including traits that determine the relative importance of the individual. European populations, particularly those of northwest Europe, have gone the farthest toward individualism, weak kinship ties, and "impersonal prosociality."
This is why Western societies have succeeded in liquidating kinship and reorganizing almost all human relationships on the market principle. The pushback from kinship has been too weak and ineffectual.
Will the rest of the world follow the Western model? I hope not, for their sake. Humans are not self-maximizing individuals, and a society based on that premise will fail tragically, even for people in the West. The desire to embrace the market economy is pushing us beyond our natural limits.
The Victorian elites thought they could expand their market economy and their empire while preserving the cultural and genetic basis that made both possible. In this, they were wrong. The latter was eventually destroyed by the former.
Additionally, the left wouldn't want low-skilled immigrants to remain as a permanent underclass forever. If low-skilled immigrants are imported for the purpose of doing all the low-skilled jobs that supposedly no one else wants to do, leftists would start complaining within a generation or two that the country needs to have better policies to raise the social mobility of the recent low-skilled immigrants and their descendants.
It's mostly unfeasible to expect high social mobility from low IQ immigrants to begin with. But even if it were successful, it would imply that the country would have to import an endless stream of low-skilled immigrants every generation to refill the vacant low-skilled occupations, which isn't sustainable.
"Indeed, national IQ is positively correlated with almost everything good and negatively correlated with almost everything bad. We therefore shouldn’t be surprised that it’s the single best predictor of economic growth and also an excellent predictor of socioeconomic development."
"If we conduct a root cause analysis using data from the Fraser Institute, we see a clear directional link between economic freedom and civilizational growth."
I agree. My agreement above mainly refers to the first sentence of the paragraph. However, the wealth of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Botswana is unrelated to economic freedom; rather, it stems from their location atop vast oil fields and diamond deposits, respectively. On an individual basis, intelligence plays a relatively minor role in wealth gain. But on a national basis, intelligence plays a rather significant role in overall economic health due to technological advancements. But economic freedom is fundamental.
Why do you disagree? The 3 countries you mentioned are exceptions to the rule because of their resource wealth, and don't really produce exceptional individuals in scientific fields. The Korea example shows why economic systems are important, but out of two states with good systems in place, the higher IQ one will still do better. Could you clarify who you meant by "they score 70"?
I know not all countries blessed with natural resources are doing well. However, all three of your examples are relatively small in population. It says a lot that none of the top countries that people want to live in globally are in Africa. Sure, they can improve, but I doubt this is likely to make an African country a true player in world politics/economy. As with North Korea, high IQ is not a guarantee, but it sure is advantageous to possess it, as opposed to low or medium IQ. Despite some downsides, it is quite undeniable that people consider Japan, South Korea and many parts of China very attractive places to visit and even live in for a period of time if possible.
Great article! This theme needs to be talked about more with receipts instead of leaving it to academics with pseudoscientific models. And it's terrible to always frame everything in terms of GDP, jobs and productivity.
In my experience, as an ex-expat living in my "home" country, the underappreciated externalities in the social sphere, which are hard to model and measure (data probably doesn't even exist), are boosting racism and intolerance as ordinary people feel unheard and people in Ivory towers don't live in the same shared spaces with recently arrived migrants.
Three small and innocuous examples come to mind: I've noticed the amount of trash on the streets in certain neighborhoods is indicative of the presence of migration (and it starts with litter and goes all the way up to washing machines/furniture, as well as dumping construction waste in wildlife adjacent spaces). I've also noticed there's also very little participation in community organizations and events (more from South American backgrounds, virtually nil from Middle East and African backgrounds). And lastly, the takeover and inappropriate use of green social spaces, rendering them unusable to locals (for instance: BBQs and parties in inappropriate places ruining them for everyone else).
And all of this saddens me as I've lived in a dozen countries across three continents, so I know the migrants who partake in the activities mentioned above don't represent what we'd describe as the middle class or higher socioeconomic strata from those cultures/societies.
Exactly. Even an “incompetent” gardener can do a lot of damage to the plantings. Here one sees—and is warned—that improper pruning, feeding, and weeding destroys/damages one’s landscaping. We see it all the time in the neighborhood as there are much “day” laborers recruited for these type jobs.
One talks about the building “trades” still being in the domain of the native population. Well, not here—or anywhere in the Southwest. YouTube videos galore showing new construction done by incompetents in all the trades, and no, city-county code inspectors do not catch such.
Some general contractors putting up such “junk” have even refused potential buyers the right to inspect finished home construction *before* purchase—rather they claim all “defects” will be handled under their warranty. Fat chance.
This post is a series of strawman arguments, economic fallacies, warmed-over historical myths, and assertions, "if X, why don't you see Y," where Y is in fact true. "Why don't high-IQ people move to low-IQ countries?" They do, and more would do so if not for immigration restrictions. Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have IQs significantly higher than America's, yet far more people move to "low-IQ" America than go in the opposite direction. Within the United States, states with the highest average IQs, as proxied by student test scores, such as Massachusetts or Minnesota, have been losing population for a long time. Texas and Florida are consistently at the top of the list for internal migration despite mediocre test scores.
Whitfeld might counter that these counterexamples should not lead us to ignore the general trend, which is that more people move from low-IQ to high-IQ areas than in the opposite direction. But this alone does not imply what he thinks it does. If someone is more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people than 300 million low-IQ people, it does not follow that he won't be even more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people AND 300 million low-IQ people.
Whitfeld commits a sleight of hand in treating "low-IQ people drag down the average" as evidence that low-IQ people are a negative externality. To see the fallacy in this, imagine a hedge fund hires a second janitor to keep their office cleaner. The "average productivity" of the firm's employees will go down, but this is not evidence the janitor is negatively impacting the quants' productivity. The pro-immigration argument is that the firm's owners should be the ones to decide whether the janitor will improve the firm's productivity, not some bureaucrat with no skin in the game like Mr. Whitfeld. (Anti-discrimination law complicates this, but it would be better to fight that directly rather than argue for closed borders.)
Whitfeld asserts without evidence that slavery reduced productivity in the American South. If this is the case, it is odd that the white American South in 1860 was one of the richest societies the world had ever seen. Poorer than the North, yes, but richer than anywhere in Europe.
Whitfeld asserts that:
"And this is assuming that the "freeing up" of native workers is actually a good thing in the long run. Native workers displaced by immigrants who go apply for a higher-skilled job will be less skilled than the people who are currently working in that job—which is of course bad from the standpoint of the job's productivity."
This only applies if the 95 IQ Japanese moving into a job causes the 105 IQ Japanese to lose his job, the "lump of labor fallacy" that was debunked back in the 18th century. Whitfeld strawmans the pro-immigration side, attempting to put concessions in his opponents' mouths:
"Once you start getting into all the other issues like individual versus household level accounting, the cost of housing in cities, negative effects on wages, conflating GDP growth with economic gains to natives and country-of-origin effects, the typical mainstream economist will retreat to their last stand: abstract economic models, long-run "what-ifs", and elegant equations where immigration magically boosts national prosperity through indirect channels."
"The argument for mass immigration goes something like this: even if immigrants raise the cost of housing, compete with native workers and strain the welfare system, they still make the economy more "dynamic". Specifically, they free up high-skilled natives to focus on more complex work, boosting economic growth through specialization of labor."
I challenge Mr. Whitfeld to name one pro-immigration thinker who accepts that immigrants "raise the cost of housing." What he's doing here is projecting his zero-sum beliefs onto his opponents. Immigration supporters would respond that while immigrants raise the demand for housing, they also raise the supply of housing by building more housing. I do not believe Mr. Whitfeld could pass the ideological Turing Test as an advocate of freer immigration.
Mr. Whitfeld repeats the common canard that "cheap labor" is some Faustian bargain, good in the short run but bad in the long run because it discourages "innovation." If this were true, he ought to use this to get rich. Create a business and while your competitors are shooting the short-term heroin of "cheap labor," do the hard, long-term labor of innovation. Great wealth will eventually be yours.
> This post is a series of strawman arguments, economic fallacies, warmed-over historical myths, and assertions, "if X, why don't you see Y," where Y is in fact true. "Why don't high-IQ people move to low-IQ countries?" They do, and more would do so if not for immigration restrictions. Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have IQs significantly higher than America's, yet far more people move to "low-IQ" America than go in the opposite direction.
You're literally defeating your own point here. East Asian countries have much higher immigration restrictions than the United States do, even if every third worlder *wanted* to move to Japan, Korea, or Taiwan, they cannot. Secondly, the United States is not really "low IQ". Its NIQ is about 97.68, white Americans actually have a comparable NIQ to Northeast Asians. The average is weighed down by nonwhites, but nonetheless, America's IQ is not lower than most other Western nations. In fact, white Americans are some of the most intelligent white population in the entire world:
No one claims sensible policies don't matter. It's true that white Americans historically and in contemporary times have always had a more economically libertarian attitude, and with a culture that prioritizes liberty and individualism, is also a good foundation for potential innovators and geniuses. But this is because the white sample in the United States is exceptional, so let's not kid ourselves and think that when the richest country in the entire world opened up to the globe beginning in 1965 that the reason why everyone wanted to move there is thanks to the great efforts of some Mexican in Arizona.
> Within the United States, states with the highest average IQs, as proxied by student test scores, such as Massachusetts or Minnesota, have been losing population for a long time. Texas and Florida are consistently at the top of the list for internal migration despite mediocre test scores.
This is genuinely embarrassing. Yes, people move away from blue to red states, no one denies that bad policy is also bad for the economy. Yes, people enjoy the better housing, better tax laws, and fewer regulations in red states, and when they do move, what kinds of neighborhoods do you think they end up in? You think the first destination is a majority-Hispanic or majority-black county? Let's not kid ourselves here, we all know what "white flight" is. In fact, white flight itself as a phenomenon is hard for pro-immigration advocates to reconcile with their narratives. Here is this beneficial complementary labor coming in to supposedly enrich white people's standards of living, and yet they run away from it. Paradoxical truly. Of course, once you consider the fact that the immigration debate is being distorted by the way immigration reduces internal mobility and the cost of that, then actually this makes perfect sense:
Ironically enough, you have made yet another excellent argument against immigration. One of the greatest virtues of the federalist system of the United States was that it provided a sort of self-correcting mechanism when it came to policymaking. After all, people can simply leave a state that has implemented poor policies in favor of a state with better policies. Due to self-selection, internal migration of existing residents will come from those who are more politically aligned with the new areas they move into (as well as some minor effect of ideological conversion). Over time, the electorate would shift to give more weight and power to the party responsible for pushing the good policies, and the other party would have to adopt better positions if it wishes to remain politically viable. Immigrants eliminate this self-correction mechanism, making it feasible for a party who pushes bad policies to remain in power because they can choose to either maintain the population of states with bad policy or move into a good state and then wreck it politically. A bad state doesn't need to compete with a good state, it just needs to remain better than the shithole the migrants come from, and it would maintain Democratic power over the electorate, while in the absence of immigration, internal migration would actually result in more policies that libertarians support.
> Whitfeld might counter that these counterexamples should not lead us to ignore the general trend, which is that more people move from low-IQ to high-IQ areas than in the opposite direction. But this alone does not imply what he thinks it does. If someone is more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people than 300 million low-IQ people, it does not follow that he won't be even more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people AND 300 million low-IQ people.
It quite literally does, unless you believe that variation within countries don't exist. A hypothetical where you have a country comprised of 300 million high IQ and 300 million low IQ individuals would mean a country of 600 million people where the average IQ is intermediate. The real world analogy to this would be any second world country with a large population.
Since smart fractions are less predictive than average NIQ for differences in economic well-being between countries, it would imply that a country with 1) very high IQ inequality, and 2) a large residual smart fraction is not more important or better than simply a country with a high average IQ.
> Whitfeld commits a sleight of hand in treating "low-IQ people drag down the average" as evidence that low-IQ people are a negative externality. To see the fallacy in this, imagine a hedge fund hires a second janitor to keep their office cleaner. The "average productivity" of the firm's employees will go down, but this is not evidence the janitor is negatively impacting the quants' productivity.
Ironically enough, this demonstrates you don't even know what economists mean when I said that. In pro-immigration circles, when immigrants crowd out a native worker, the native is "freed up" to go apply for a better and more complex job. The problem with this is that immigrants typically crowd out a comparable worker (i.e., mostly low-skilled workers), so that worker who then goes to apply for a "high-skilled" occupation has lower skill than the current workers in that occupation. If you actually understood what I meant (which you evidently did not), the analogy would be more like this: a police department hires a new officer who is incompetent at the job. He loses the evidence often, commonly fails to catch and arrest the suspect, is too gullible and tricked by smooth-talkers, etc., which frequently ropes other officers into his cases in the process. Or, a cleaning department hires a new janitor who doesn't do a very thorough job. During the mopping process, he pushes the gunk onto the edges of the walls, which results in the department having to call a wall repair service more frequently.
Your example, meanwhile, of a company delegating very specific roles to everyone, also works in a country with zero immigrants.
> Whitfeld asserts without evidence that slavery reduced productivity in the American South. If this is the case, it is odd that the white American South in 1860 was one of the richest societies the world had ever seen. Poorer than the North, yes, but richer than anywhere in Europe.
If you agree that the American South would have been better off economically if they accepted industrialization like the North had early on and ditched slavery, then you agree that slavery did in fact reduce their productivity. Differences between countries do not necessarily have to be explained by the same causes as differences within countries. Enslaved blacks saw rapid socioeconomic convergence with their Northern counterparts once slavery was abolished. Despite this, enslaved blacks also had better standards of living than many European countries at the time, but you would obviously be dishonest to propose from the rapid catch-up of Southern blacks to Northern blacks that having slavery is no worse than not having slavery for their prospects.
> This only applies if the 95 IQ Japanese moving into a job causes the 105 IQ Japanese to lose his job, the "lump of labor fallacy" that was debunked back in the 18th century.
Confident assertions! Firstly, no, a 95 IQ Japanese can make it worse for every other 105 Japanese person working the same job as long as he's worse at the job, which he almost certainly is, because everyone will suddenly have to accommodate his little screw-ups and flaws. Secondly, you seem to not even understand what "lump of labor" even means. The so-called "lump of labor fallacy" refers to incorrectly attempting to assess economic effects from a view that the total number of jobs in an economy is fixed, it actually has nothing to do with the "positive crowd-out" I'm referring to. In fact, "positive crowd-out" is perfectly compatible with flexible number of jobs. We can imagine in a hypothetical where a new job opening occurs for a higher-skilled job because the migrant picking tomatoes "freed" up a native to do something else with his life, so this native doesn't take the job of any other native, versus one where the native does replace another native. In both scenarios, the inefficiencies I described earlier in my reply would still exist. Thirdly, handwaving something by calling it a fallacy when you don't even understand the concept, beyond obviously not being a good look on your part, is also mildly intellectually dishonest. In reality, the "lump of labor" fallacy is not so much a fallacy as it is a circumstantial caveat. Yes, the economy is not permanently fixed, but many factors can make the adjustment process slower or the effect of displacement worse. To quote from the piece where I had covered this briefly:
"We know that immigrant settlement patterns aren’t random but based on the local opportunities available (Kim & Sakamoto, 2013), meaning that these sorts of shocks to natives are occurring in relatively nice locations with high opportunity. Unsurprisingly then, in not just the United States but across countries with high levels of immigration, we can see that citizens are moving from areas of high productivity to areas of low productivity.
{Insert Figure 28 from the paper}
Note: GVA per worker = “gross value added per worker”. Notice that in various countries, the GVA per worker is negatively correlated with the internal mobility rate, implying that in these countries, citizens move towards relatively less productive areas. From Stansbury et al. (2023).
With this, we now have a potential mechanism for the displacement effect to persist, and in fact, there’s evidence that it does. Kim & Sakamoto had also analyzed the long-term effects of immigration on native wages in both two-digit and one-digit occupations from 1994 to 2006. The results from the occupation-level approach are presented on the right side, and we can see that the negative effect remained.
{Insert Table 4 from the paper}
An excellent study which specifically looks at the effect of immigrants on native wages and accounts for the internal mobility of natives is Price et al. (2023). The authors explored what happened to native “movers” and “stayers” when immigrants moved in. After controlling for natives that were displaced as well as selective in-migration, the stayers did not see an income gain. Young workers were tracked for thirty years and were found to have suffered a persistent income loss that had not recovered, and among the ones that were displaced, their losses were twice as large as non-movers.2
{Insert Figure 5 from the paper}
And remember, in the modern context, natives are forced into areas that are worse than what they started off with in terms of opportunities, so we have no reason to expect that things got any better for them. Displacement aside, another interesting consideration is that of monopsonies and their ability to use immigrants to reduce the bargaining power of native workers, resulting in much slower wage adjustments than is traditionally assumed. Indeed, the Amior & Manning study considered this possibility, finding that “Based on our estimates, the expansion of native mark-downs (in response to migration) dominates the aggregate gains in marginal products. As a result, the average native wage declines, even in a “long run” setting with elastic capital. Though aggregate native income grows (due to the transfer of migrants’ rents), more than 100% of these gains go to profits, as the increased mark-downs redistribute income from workers to firms” (p. 39).
So while the pie might not be literally fixed, it certainly seems that it’s possible for the adjustment process to be slow enough to cause long-term pain for the natives affected."
"The "fixed pie" is the more correct worldview for many companies that dominate today.
Most specific companies and their founders don't matter that much to people not invested in them specifically. The economic activity they preside over was inevitable and it's only a zero-sum question of who captures the market. The model of being a top business today has been to capture some conduit of economic activity, rather than being a manufacturer of widgets.
This is most true in the case of social media companies, which exist to maximize engagement and sell ads. The rise of a new media platform just re-routes a limited pool of attention to a new fiefdom. If any one founder of the site-that-would-be-twitter didn't exist, it's not like the economic activity represented by twitter ceases to exist from that timeline. But the people in charge do matter to the rules that are in place and what content gets promoted, so handing control of your media to foreigners loses native editorial control while creating no new value.
The same is true of much of the tech world that exists as extensions of physical services. Something like Uber was inevitable as soon as the smartphone proliferated. Ride-sharing systems with electronic reputation management was imagined by writers as early as the 1970s. The smartphone made this politically unstoppable, and it was only a question of which company would scramble fastest to grab the market, by the most legally questionable means.
If you add a hundred new genius "founders" to America, there's not going to be a hundred Ubers or Twitters because the market was only ever going to support a particular concentration of firms, a certain amount of user engagement, a certain amount of consumer spending to collect fees on. As an American it's more important that the set of institutions enabled by present technology end up being controlled by people who share your values."
> I challenge Mr. Whitfeld to name one pro-immigration thinker who accepts that immigrants "raise the cost of housing."
Firstly, very amusing proposition that I have to name someone who has every bit of ideological motivation to deny this, apparently a restrictionist argument is only acceptable if a xenophile agrees with it but not the other way around, seems mildly unfair. But secondly, I accept your challenge. Behold, Alex Nowrasteh from the Cato Institute in his piece "JD Vance Is Correct: Immigration Increases Housing Prices, and That’s Okay": https://www.cato.org/blog/jd-vance-correct-immigration-increases-housing-prices-thats-ok
Obviously, Nowrasteh spends a long portion of the article explaining why in his magical world, raising housing prices is actually not a problem. We can of course get into the empirical debate about whether or not an immigrant's effect on the prices is greater or less than their effect on demand for housing, that's a perfectly fine discussion to be had on its own, but since your only challenge here was asking me to "name one pro-immigration thinker who accepts that immigrants "raise the cost of housing"", I believe I have done a satisfactory job.
> I do not believe Mr. Whitfeld could pass the ideological Turing Test as an advocate of freer immigration.
Evidently, you are much better at describing yourself than you are at describing me.
> Mr. Whitfeld repeats the common canard that "cheap labor" is some Faustian bargain, good in the short run but bad in the long run because it discourages "innovation." If this were true, he ought to use this to get rich. Create a business and while your competitors are shooting the short-term heroin of "cheap labor," do the hard, long-term labor of innovation. Great wealth will eventually be yours.
Ah, nice job raising the bar for being a valid authority figure on anything, now we're straight up invoking genetic fallacies. White liberals who insist that immigration is absolutely wonderful and an unquestionable good live in areas that are so white that one would need binoculars to find a Mexican roaming around and pay a premium to send their kids to private schools that have close to zero migrant students. There is a clear discrepancy between what people claim and how they actually behave. Not surprising that they're the same group of people who accuse white conservatives of being racists and then avoid diverse areas as much as them while also engaging in white flight even *more* than them.
I don't have time to respond to all of these, but I'll note that "white flight" means "white flight from blacks" 90% of the time. There is no Hispanic equivalent of Detroit or Baltimore. Immigration restrictionism is fueled by people treating the entire non-white world as if they are American blacks, which they are not in either their propensity to commit crimes, their voting behavior, or the degree to which they drive white people out of areas. And as for white flight from blacks, while it existed before 1964, it only became endemic with the Civil Rights Act. It was not a "market failure" caused by the free movement of people, it was a result of heavy-handed government intervention. Liberty is the solution.
> I'll note that "white flight" means "white flight from blacks" 90% of the time. There is no Hispanic equivalent of Detroit or Baltimore. Immigration restrictionism is fueled by people treating the entire non-white world as if they are American blacks, which they are not in either their propensity to commit crimes, their voting behavior, or the degree to which they drive white people out of areas.
Do you just like being wrong? Whites flee from Hispanics too. First paper:
"Using geo-linked data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the decennial census, we compare probabilities of neighborhood out-migration for Anglos, blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans by varying ethno-racial neighborhood compositions. Analyses for Latinos are disaggregated by nativity status. **The results indicate that Anglos have a higher likelihood of moving when they have many minority neighbors and there is little difference whether minority neighbors are black or Latino**."
"We found that one-third of districts experienced rising enrollments of Latino children of at least 250 children between 2000 and 2015 (32 percent of the 4,293 districts). Among suburban districts meeting this growth threshold (n = 656), White enrollments grew in just 131 districts and fell in the remaining 525—evincing a contemporary version of White flight."
> And as for white flight from blacks, while it existed before 1964, it only became endemic with the Civil Rights Act.
I am not sure what exactly telling me "blacks suck, and they sucked more once you can't disassociate from them completely" is supposed to prove. I do not recall disagreeing with this.
> It was not a "market failure" caused by the free movement of people, it was a result of heavy-handed government intervention.
Evidently, this "free movement of people", whether it's in a situation where people can freely disassociate or the government tries to force integration, white people don't want to be around blacks (and Hispanics). When given the freedom the choose, or when attempted coercion by the government is tried, whites find ways to leave. So really, the lesson here is that there's no way to resolve the issue that blacks (and Hispanics) are not so good for the well-being of white people, there's only the extent to which damage control can be implemented (fleeing from them). I honestly am perplexed and wonder if you even tried to think out your response before sending it.
> Liberty is the solution.
Which was not remotely proven at all in this attempt at a response. Ironically, even more good arguments against immigration, because now we're really playing mental gymnastics.
"See, if you just have a low-skilled group complement the high-skilled group, everyone will be better off. No? Oh, okay fine, not *that* low-skilled, they can't be too different. I mean something intermediate, like Hispanics. Oh, whites respond poorly to Hispanics too? They would still pay a premium to not enjoy the benefits of labor specialization? What? If there were no foreigners here in the first place, no one would even have to think about how to deal with the issue of white flight? Well, umm... just let people move around you bigot!"
Your argument for how Hispanics don't create a Detroit or Baltimore is literally because their IQ disparity with whites is less dramatic so their shitholes are less shitty in comparison to blacks. You are implicitly recognizing here that perhaps so-called labor segmentation from large IQ/ability group inequality is not inherently worth it because your example relies on picking a group which has about half the average group difference in IQ as between blacks and whites, which should also reduce the amount of segmentation that occurs.
Firstly, what the authors *think* is the cause has nothing to do with the actual cause. The authors of the first paper can *claim* it's due to racism, but that's an empirical question on its own. Speaking of the empirical question of racism, since you raised all these historical grievances with blacks, the reality is that slavery did not have any lasting impact on the socioeconomic livelihood of blacks in the United States. They caught up to their Northern counterparts rapidly following emancipation and the gaps closed (but not with whites, consistent with the hereditarian hypothesis).
There is actually very little evidence that blacks were ever discriminated against historically. I have a long post analyzing discrimination against blacks throughout American history including both government and individual-level discrimination here:
> That study didn’t control for neighborhood crime rates, levels of education.
That would actually be inappropriate to do so because in the context here, on the discourse of positive complementary effects of immigration, labor segmentation *requires* that two groups differ in their average ability so that they specialize into different roles. If you want a multiple regression to test for white flight after a bunch of controls, that would be cool and all, but you would be arguing against a different point not relevant to my article at all.
> or preconceived biases
Preconceived biases or "implicit biases" are delusional leftist cope and basically have no actual predictive validity in acting discriminatory towards another group:
> This doesn’t mean Anglo-Saxons inherently want to move away from ethnic minorities. What it does mean is that racist preconceptions can lead to a reification of behavioral traits.
I am of the perception that white people were not that good at being properly racist throughout history and certainly today they are the most awful at it except to themselves. However, even *if* we suppose that it were the case, well, the trend has continued to this day.
> If people believe blacks are criminals, they’re more likely to leave those neighborhoods. Conversely, if they don’t hold those views, they’re less likely to leave.
And of course, the irony of you saying this is that, as I've mentioned already, white liberals are actually more likely to engage in white flight than white conservatives, so racism seems like a poor explanation even as a basic litmus test.
> Why is Argentina quickly becoming very rich if Hispanics are supposedly "dumb"? Why is a great leader, Javier Milei—God bless his name—making that place a beautiful paradise, while Russia, much closer to Northern Europeans, has homelands that look like utter shitholes and are declining?
I do not know what you think "becoming rich" means. Milei's accomplishment has been bringing inflation down. Claiming Argentina is "becoming rich" is an incredibly generous statement. Argentina's per capita GDP is comparable to its neighbors and significantly lower than Russia's, so I really have no clue where this claim is coming from.
> Also, why is Botswana rich if Africans are supposedly deficient in IQ? Why is Botswana super rich?
Evidently, you have not even tried to check your own claims before posting them. It's neat though that Russia, Argentina, and Botswana rank-order in their per capita GDP exactly as would be predicted by their NIQs.
> You have no arguments, and you misrepresent your own data to fit your preconceived delusions.
I feel like I've said 'projection' one too many times already in this thread.
> The vast majority of scholars don’t even accept race as a concept, and I’m sorry, this isn’t an appeal to authority.
There's no expert consensus on this, you quite literally made that up. Why make claims like these when you're not even going to bother to fact-check them first? There are surveys out there for this purpose, but you evidently do not know this. Speaking of "experts", a supermajority of experts in intelligence research also believe that the black-white IQ gap is at least partly mediated by genetic differences:
> An appeal to authority only applies when they aren’t experts in the field.
If you want to redefine the actual definition of appeal to authority which can be found from five seconds of Google searching to make yourself feel better, I can't stop you. It just simply isn't one anyone debating argumentative fallacies actually use. Even if that weren't the case, expert opinion is only valid insofar as being an expert is actually close to being correct. In practice, experts are terrible at predicting things, don't understand basic statistical concepts, and peer review is awful at quality checking:
"Within the United States, states with the highest average IQs, as proxied by student test scores, such as Massachusetts or Minnesota, have been losing population for a long time."
The claim that Massachusetts and Minnesota have the highest IQ scores has always lacked credibility. Someone of good repute should look into how this age-old claim is substantiated.
> "If someone is more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people than 300 million low-IQ people, it does not follow that he won't be even more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people AND 300 million low-IQ people"
Setting aside the incredibly dubious economic logic here, what happens to the economy if there's an ethnic civil war between the high and low-IQ populations?
Whitfeld courageously blocked me on his own substack, so I'll just reiterate here that I'm very skeptical that "immigration inhibits automation" is an argument for less migration. The obesity epidemic and TFR decline is almost certainly a downstream consequence of the shift from an agriculture + manufacturing economy to an urbanised services-based economy, for example.
Friedrich List, a German liberal in exile in America was inspired by Alexander Hamilton’s and Henry Clay’s American System to research the economic history of England, Hanseatic League, and others to draw practical lessons in industrial development policies in his 1844 landmark book “Political Economy”. Unlike his rivals Adam Smith and Karl Marx, he started with the actual history, not ideal abstractions. He’s so influential that even Lenin, Stalin, Deng shifted their countries away from classical Marxism to Listian policy to develop their economy away from agriculture to industrial power. China and America before 1970 were the most successful cases. He needed to be more widely known today.
Why is this obviously bad? It sucks for those who's wages decline, but from the buyers perspective, competition among workers should put downward pressure on wages, and so lower the cost of goods / services.
I don't buy into the "artificially restrict labour available so as to inflate local wages" approach as being obviously net beneficial.
You’re referring to the “immigrant surplus”, which is what I meant at the start of this article when it comes to conflating GDP growth with gains to natives. Here’s the relevant part about this that I wrote in another piece:
“In economics, while immigrants depress the wages of competing workers, firms benefit from being able to employ labor at cheaper costs, and some consumers gain from cheaper goods and services. The net gain from subtracting the winners’ gains and the losers’ losses is referred to as the “immigrant surplus”. In practice, this surplus is extremely small, just 2.2% of the increase in GDP, while the rest of the benefit goes to the immigrants themselves as wages and benefits (Borjas, 2013). If it isn’t obvious already, this small surplus covers up a massive bottom-up wealth redistribution from workers to employers, though with some benefit to consumers. Now, of course, this model is sensitive to the assumptions employed. Amior & Manning (2024) focused on the way monopsonies influenced the market dynamics of migrant and native workers. Since monopsonies have significant market power to influence wages, employers do not feel as much pressure to adjust wages quickly based on supply and demand. Under this model, both the wage reduction and the immigrant surplus would become larger than under the assumption of perfect competition. Aside from these two studies, the famous and highly cited 2017 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine had estimated that the actual “benefit” of immigration to the native-born could be $54.2 billion a year. The authors don’t demonstrate how they got this number, but they provide all the information necessary to calculate it. In short, this “benefit” to the natives would come from reducing the wages of native workers who are in competition with immigrants by $439.4 billion annually, but the gain to businesses would be $548.1 billion, which would create a net “benefit” of $54.2 billion to natives. Whether or not most people would consider this a benefit, however, might be a slightly different story. Still, even this is probably overstating the ‘benefit’ of migrants, as it cannot account for the various indirect impacts that this large-scale bottom-up wealth redistribution has. For instance, natives whose prospects are hurt by migrants and leave their local area are also probably more likely to end up on welfare afterward, but the formula for calculating the immigrant surplus does not capture this, so in practice, the immigrant surplus is closer to $0 or even negative.”
In fact, assuming that the *only* effect of bottom-up redistribution is just more welfare use from native workers who were hurt and nothing else (this is an extremely charitable assumption but let’s grant it here), if every crowded-out native used a couple thousand dollars more of welfare each year, that entirely offsets the surplus. And again, this is assuming that increased welfare usage is the *only* side effect.
As a follow up, is it your belief that the potential downside suffered by natives is enough to outweigh the obvious benefit gained by the immigrants (i.e. their income being multiplied by 5 or 10x or 15x)?
For the record, I am not against helping people outside of my own country. But, I do believe immigration as a solution is misguided and will actually make the entire world worse off in the long run (poor countries currently also depend on the technological innovations of intelligent countries, keeping intelligent countries as prosperous and differentiated as possible will have benefits of diffusion to the rest of the world). It will probably be best for the sake of world peace to stabilize the situation of the third world. Read this to understand the implications of complete freedom of movement: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2025/02/end-stage-global-capitalism/
To be clear, I didn't think you would be against helping people outside of your own country.
The video seems somewhat orthogonal to the point I was making since it can both be true that (a) immigration to the US (since that was the example used) has a negligible impact on reducing world poverty and (b) the benefit gained by those who do immigrate from impoverished / poorly run countries to wealthy / well run countries is greater than the downside suffered by the native population of the wealthy country in question. Assuming b is true, then allowing immigrants to move from their impoverished countries to the US or Japan would be net positive (even if it does have a net negative impact on the native population) and worth doing.
As I understand your view, you don't believe that would be the case with low-IQ immigrants (though perhaps you do think high-IQ immigrants are beneficial to the economy, as Borjas (2013) concludes) since the low-IQ immigrants have some negative societal effect (a higher rate of accepting bribes than the native population, possibly causing lower rates of automatisation) that aren't offset by their economic contributions.
I find the point on keeping countries as "prosperous and differentiated as possible will have benefits of diffusion to the rest of the world" a little hand-wavy. One can allow in large sums of immigrants without threatening the established institutions (see the Gulf States as a partial example). What is the causal chain by which allowing in low IQ immigrants reduces technological innovations? Presumably these people won't end up in Moderna or SpaceX or whatever, since they won't surpass the credential barrier. Even if employers suck at identifying productive workers, some crude measures will probably avoid the potential downsides here. Is it something like "well, they increase corruption and overall damage the fabric of society sufficiently such that running the business and institutes that make technological progress becomes impossible"?
On Kirkegaard's piece:
"Most ethnics marry within their group, but not all of them, and all of them engage in some level of outbreeding. If we wait long enough (100s of years), there will be genetic panmixia. In that world, there will be no purebred ethnics left, and no high or low intelligence genetic clusters as we see now. "
This seems suspect? What happened to assortative mating? How does this claim square with countries having existed in one form or another for several hundred years and still managing to possess distinct ethnic groups?
> the benefit gained by those who do immigrate from impoverished / poorly run countries to wealthy / well run countries is greater than the downside suffered by the native population of the wealthy country in question. Assuming b is true, then allowing immigrants to move from their impoverished countries to the US or Japan would be net positive (even if it does have a net negative impact on the native population) and worth doing.
The gain to migrants can also only exist if the destination country is better than the one they come from (obviously). The problem is migrants make the destination country ever more like the host country, so the gains for future waves are eventually going to diminish and then there simply won't be any at all.
If you want to help them, it should not come at the expense of those already here. It’s not at all obvious why their well-being should take precedence over natives. It is possible to improve their quality of life in their own countries without destroying our own, and that’s what I support. People who claim to be highly compassionate are almost never the ones who lose anything for this supposed humanitarian kindness they preach; they just let poor Americans bear the brunt of the negative effects of migrants while they themselves live in some gated community which is basically a miniature version of a white ethnostate.
> As I understand your view, you don't believe that would be the case with low-IQ immigrants (though perhaps you do think high-IQ immigrants are beneficial to the economy, as Borjas (2013) concludes) since the low-IQ immigrants have some negative societal effect (a higher rate of accepting bribes than the native population, possibly causing lower rates of automatisation) that aren't offset by their economic contributions.
High IQ immigration has its own problems, mostly political, which eventually translates downstream into indirect costs (Aporia has published the relevant pieces on those by Arctotherium, you can search for it yourself). Possibly one can work out a way to make it work, but a first step towards doing that is recognizing that "Immigrasia" does not exist. There is no country where all the immigrants come from, immigrants are not a homogenous sample, so when we discuss immigration, the immediate question to ask should be "immigrants from where"?
> I find the point on keeping countries as "prosperous and differentiated as possible will have benefits of diffusion to the rest of the world" a little hand-wavy. One can allow in large sums of immigrants without threatening the established institutions (see the Gulf States as a partial example).
The problem with the gulf states example is that the reason why the gulf states work is because they're despotic states with draconian laws where citizenship is almost impossible to get and foreign workers are basically cannon fodder. Sure, in such a system, you can argue that immigration *could* work, but the problem is everyone who pushes for open borders (mostly libertarians and leftists) want to get the benefit of open borders as with the gulf states without adopting the style of governance of gulf states because they like freedom or liberal democracy. Fundamentally, those are incompatible stances.
I can personally grant that if you implemented segregation or apartheid in the West, we can negotiate more low-skilled workers, but if you’re willing to accept this proposal to make open borders work, you are obviously in the slim slim minority of open border advocates.
> What is the causal chain by which allowing in low IQ immigrants reduces technological innovations?
Resources wasted. If the government could have spent a set amount each year on R&D research but had to siphon a portion of it away for social services to accommodate migrants, that's an example of reducing innovation. Any inefficiencies they are responsible for that diverts resources could have gone to innovation. But let's use a simpler example besides innovation to illustrate the same idea: nobody likes getting into accidents, both because it's expensive and presumably because you don't want to die. The likelihood of you getting into say a car accident is a function of three things: your ability to drive properly (positively correlated with IQ), the the ability of everyone around you to drive properly (also positively correlated with IQ), and how well the roads are maintained (government and private spending). Even if you had incredible driving skills (high IQ and practice), if everyone around you are awful drivers who should've had their licenses revoked (low IQ), and the roads are full of cracks and holes (the government siphoned some of the money for road maintenance to pay for social services), your risk of getting into an accident also increases. This is probably not a good thing.
However, negative externalities on innovation is not limited to low-skilled migrants. Foreign students are notorious for engaging in academic fraud, which is obviously not good for innovation if reviewers have to go through more trouble with retractions and investigations. There is another aspect to this, which is that our foreign students are largely from China and India, and surveys shows that nearly all of them share technological insight with their peers back in their home countries. If all you care about is global prosperity, this is not necessarily bad, but for people who would like the United States to maintain its competitive edge against China, this is of course very bad. So, migration is also a way for opponents to narrow the technological gap with the West.
> This seems suspect? What happened to assortative mating?
Assortative mating exists but it is not perfect. It is actually astonishingly weak for many personality traits, meta-analytic literature puts it at around 0.3-0.4 between couples. Genius can be thought of as an interaction effect between extremely high IQ and the right personality, the fact that assortative mating is not strong with regards to personality screws with the likelihood of producing a genius. Miscegenation also blurs racial boundaries, so even if we had some whites who preferred dating whites over nonwhites, the blurring of racial boundaries will make it more acceptable for those whites to mate with "white-passing" clines that will eventually result in genomic extinction. It's also a simple fact of population biology that uniform mixing between originally differentiated populations results in some loss of the original genetic diversity.
> How does this claim square with countries having existed in one form or another for several hundred years and still managing to possess distinct ethnic groups?
I am not sure what examples you have in mind specifically. People in historical times were also far more implicitly prejudiced against other groups of people and any sort of "marrying out" was generally frowned upon.
Yes, this is a clear case wherein Economic Theory is a lot more ambiguous about a topic than the impression given by Economic Policy pundits
There's an important point regarding the Economic arguments for loosening immigration: "labor shortages" is a euphemism for "wages are too low"
In a free market, long term labor shortages shouldn't happen - wages should rise until more of the native population enters that workforce, and this proceeds until a new equilibrium with both more workers employed as well as higher wages are realized.
Instead of importing workers to fill a labor shortages, why not figure out the reasons for structurally depressed wages in the first place?
(the answer, of course, includes a lot of the parasitic regulatory functions of progressive policy, which is why this question is not explored)
“Calling the children “natives” doesn’t change the fact that they are an expense that only arose because their parents were allowed into the country in the first place”
Bingo. A couple of decades or so ago, I saw the CA stat’s for immigrants wrt to their current wages as low level manual laborers and the estimated expense of just two of their children attending public school in CA, K-12. Two children attending public school for 12 years was projected at that time to cost $300k and that was not including inflation projections. The typical (low) household income was well below any conceivable tax rate able to recoup such a taxpayer footed expense across even a lifetime of menial wage household income.
The knock on (beneficial) effects of such immigration is little more than wishful thinking. As “Realist” has succinctly noted, cost in $$$ pales to cost in IQ dilution of the nation. Those costs will live on forever and be subtly hidden.
I’ll reply with a simple stat you could have looked up, had you desired to fact check rather than state an unsupported emotional assertion:
From ChatGPT:
”… -The 2025–26 state budget allocates roughly $118.9 billion under Proposition 98 just for K–12, which translates to:
-Approximately $18,918 per pupil from those state funds,
-And about $24,764 per pupil when federal and additional state funding are included”
Do the math.
A single child over 13 years schooling today costs in excess of $300k. 2 children, $600k
The median household income for CA in 2023 was $95k, the average tax rate for State income and sales is about 9%. So a household at best seems to contribute $8,500.
There is no way an IA family that drops, two kids of is gonna be a net asset and they ain’t raising no Einsteins—in the main.
I could respond more in depth to your response, but have learned folk like yourself are not subject to rationale thought and my time is limited.
I wish people wouldn't use ChatGPT as a source.
Why? Be specific. You suspect ChatGPT is returning inaccurate facts? Do you think ChatGPT played an essential part of the meaning intended by my comment, rather than simply support my opinion?
Do you use ChatGPT? The facts I’ve quoted from ChatGPT are a summation/interpretation of which there are included (by ChatGPT) several *dozen* citations from various sources it used—Census Bureau, Wikipedia, several insurance companies, financial publications, etc. I used it only for numbers I have a recollection of in order to obtain a current update of my memory from a couple of decades ago.
Had ChatGPT disagreed with what I originally posted, I’d have retracted my (challenged) comment. If I had to examine each and every source used by ChatGPT to generate basic stat’s, there would be no commentary possible due to the immensity of the effort. If I failed to use ChatGPT, or any citations, to support my argument, then I’d simply be spouting gratuitous assertions as most folk seem to do in commentary these days.
> "Why? Be specific. You suspect ChatGPT is returning inaccurate facts?"
Yeah, it does that on occasion, though my broader objection is to delegating the burden of original research.
https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-death-of-the-student-essayand
> "I could respond more in depth to your response, but have learned folk like yourself are not subject to rationale thought and my time is limited"
Not limited enough to avoid being a prick, apparently.
Obviously, you are new at this. So you feel “insulted” by words directed to someone else. You need to grow a pair if you want to survive in this world of commentary and opinion back and forth. In any event, there was no insult until the repeated challenge to supported commentary with more gratuitous assertions. Long experience has shown there will be no meeting of minds with such folk, but also that they will never, ever, allow themselves *not* to have the last word. So the commentary simply becomes wasted effort.
As to your citation, that is a problem—but it is a problem that is at least several decades old and not originally an AI problem. AI has simply perfected/elevated it. Years ago we required students to submit essays to “Turnitin”. Plagiarism being rampant even then. AI is just making it harder to detect, but it can be detected, or at least suspected if you are savvy enough. Problem is one of time for lazy faculty.
Total nonsense not supported by the stat’s. If you want to cite make believe facts and figures, from biased “not for profits”, I can as well. All are made up estimates and as such gratuitous assertions. Given your stat’s, we should pay for even more illegals to come into the USA and drop children. Why, there’d be no end to how we’d all profit. Grow up. This country cannot absorb 15-20M IA’s as well as the legal 5M that came in during the Biden years.
The typical IA comes from a country where he scraped the ground with a stick to survive. No skill sets to make a living in a 1st world technological society. All the benefits you cite can be easily refuted with an analysis of the welfare implications of such low skilled individuals. Take for example the ever growing costs of tax payer health care for these individuals at the lowest economic ranks. Here we’ve had to practically double Medicaid in just the last few years because of such influx.
No thanks, I’ll mow my lawn myself and be better off for it.
And heck, we’ve not even spoken about the demographic and societal changes these people bring with them as they flood society. For one, these IA’s reduce the wages of those legally seeking manual labor employment—and that’s really the basis for their admission, low wage (slave) labor for the large corporations and fat cats. Cheap housing has all but dried up—hard to compete with IA’s living six to a room. The rest of us still working pay the price in taxes and disrupted communities.
Go away, you’re not convincing anyone.
There is not a single race specified in my commentary.
WRT Indians, I worked extensively with such in University settings. All were wonderful people, highly intelligent, and sought after as faculty and grad students. However, that may or may not be a reason for them, or rather their less endowed countrymen, to be freely admitted as residents.
Like it or not, culture is downstream from race, which is downstream from biology. This country was not founded by Indians, rather Northern Europeans. Until the 1960’s we were a White, European nation. The concept of a melting pot worked quite well with those peoples. Today, not so much.
But you are correct in one thing, open borders and the welfare State are incompatible. BTW, I was a card carrying Libertarian for 20+ years—even knew David Nolan here. However, I grew up when I became a Race Realist.
Indian crime rates typically aren't high, but that could be due to any combination of culture and genetics. (Also, nepotism seems to be a major problem in specific industries.)
Bryan Caplan and Richard Hanania like to see themselves as "scientists" in opposition to the irrational yahoos on the other side. A true scientist, however, first tests a new proposal on a small sample of consenting participants. The requirement of "consent" is critical. If there is no consent, the experiment cannot go ahead.
If the results are promising, a true scientist will then try to replicate the results with a larger sample. If the results are still good, the proposal is tentatively accepted — although it is still subject to review and criticism. In fact, criticism is always encouraged.
This approach has little in common with what people like Bryan Caplan and Richard Hanania are advocating. Where is the consent? Where is the preliminary testing on a small scale? And where is the freedom to criticize?
Excellent description of a scientist.
Systematic reviews should only be done on empirical data.
What does that mean?
Consent is an ethical obligation. It has no bearing on the scientific quality of a study. It would be possible to coerce the participation of unwilling human subjects (or, better, indifferent to whether they participated voluntarily or by coercion or even without their knowledge) in a superbly designed randomized double-blinded clinical trial ("experiment".) This would be good science, because it would probably answer the question being tested, even though it was bad ethics. The university's institutional review board would not let the study go ahead.
The research Caplan and Hanania are discussing is non-experimental research where the data already exist and just have to be examined and analyzed retrospectively. Criminal offences committed by immigrants compared with the native-born would be an example. There is no need to obtain consent from the people whose data are being analyzed unless you need access to their names and personal information, which you usually don't.
I think you are confusing these types of research: prospective experiments and retrospective data analysis.
In both types of research, the researchers should work out, *during the conception and design of the study*, using statistical power computation the number of people they need to study, in order to have a good chance of detecting the effect they are looking for, if it exists. There is no basis for "underpowering" a study. That just wastes resources. If you know you need 1000 subjects, budget your project to study 1000 subjects. Nothing is gained by studying 50 first. (If it's a medical treatment that you worry might have toxic side effects, then you may want to study a small number first to make sure the treatment is not too dangerous to inflict on larger numbers, but that's a different question.)
"The research Caplan and Hanania are discussing is non-experimental research where the data already exist and just have to be examined and analyzed retrospectively."
The data cannot be analyzed retrospectively because the experiment hasn't been completed. Of course, the preliminary findings don't seem very promising, but Caplan and Hanania will insist that we stay the course and pursue the experiment to its bitter end.
It's like Hitler in his bunker. It's impossible to tell such people that things aren't going to plan. They'll just get angry at you.
There's no experiment. There is observation of data emerging as they come. Have you never done retrospective research, or any research to know when you are doing an experiment and when you are observing natural evolution? There may be others doing what you see as social "experiments" but Caplan and Hanania don't have their hands on the levers of power that run these "experiments" and decide when to end them?
I invoke Godwin's law and advise you to stop. You are sounding more than a little paranoid, and I doubt if you have ever done any science.
It's not paranoia to say that Bryan Caplan is a major player in current policy making. Richard Hanania is a minor player, but the same cannot be said for his employer, the Cato Institute.
Nor is it paranoia to say that their political advocacy has real-life consequences. They themselves say as much. In fact, they would feel more insulted if I told them that their advocacy is inconsequential.
So, no, it doesn't bother me in the least to call them out. And I will not cease to do so.
Libertarianism, like all ideologies, is a simplification of reality. It assumes that a free market economy will self-generate as long as government gets out of the way. Unfortunately, this assumption is just that — an assumption. Markets have existed throughout history and prehistory in most societies. It is only in a handful of high-trust societies, however, that markets have evolved into a true market economy.
A high-trust society, like a market economy, will not self-generate unless the population has: 1) a high level of cognitive ability; 2) a low propensity for settling disputes through violence; 3) a low level of time preference (i.e., willingness to accept present pain for future gain); 4) a high level of guilt proneness (i.e., feelings of guilt when you break a rule even if the rule-breaking is not witnessed by anyone else); and 5) a high level of empathy (i.e., a desire to help others and not hurt them because you have internalized their pain).
These qualities prevail in only a handful of societies. And those societies are responsible for most of the economic activity in this world.
Mass migration is not wrong because a growing proportion of migrants are "unskilled" or "uneducated." Yes, a modern economy needs people who are numerate, literate, and capable of planning. But you won't get them by ensuring they all have a college degree. Even in Western societies, a college degree only ensures a mean IQ of about 100. In other societies, even that threshold is not met because you can earn a degree at a "degree mill." Or you can buy one.
But let's assume we can force all migrants to take an IQ test and let in only those with an IQ of at least 100. You're still not ensuring they have the other qualities that are needed for a high-trust society, i.e., low propensity for violence, low time preference, guilt proneness, empathy, etc.
Only a minority of human populations have all of those requisite qualities. Sure, you can still create a semblance of a high-rust society through police state methods: video surveillance, internment and deportation of suspected criminals without the benefit of trial, etc. That's how they do things in Dubai, and I suspect that's the way Western societies are going. But it's not exactly libertarian.
I agree. Cognitive ability is not the main reason why a true market economy cannot develop in South Asia. The main reason is the low level of trust. People prefer to make money with close relatives, while keeping everyone else at a safe distance. As a result, the market principle cannot replace kinship as the main organizing principle of society.
South Asians will inevitably act in ways that seem "irrational" in terms of market economics. Again, the problem isn't intelligence or lack of intelligence. The problem is that you cannot have a true market economy without a high level of trust in people who are neither close relatives nor longstanding friends.
Human populations differ in many mental and behavioral traits, including traits that determine the relative importance of the individual. European populations, particularly those of northwest Europe, have gone the farthest toward individualism, weak kinship ties, and "impersonal prosociality."
This is why Western societies have succeeded in liquidating kinship and reorganizing almost all human relationships on the market principle. The pushback from kinship has been too weak and ineffectual.
Will the rest of the world follow the Western model? I hope not, for their sake. Humans are not self-maximizing individuals, and a society based on that premise will fail tragically, even for people in the West. The desire to embrace the market economy is pushing us beyond our natural limits.
The Victorian elites thought they could expand their market economy and their empire while preserving the cultural and genetic basis that made both possible. In this, they were wrong. The latter was eventually destroyed by the former.
Additionally, the left wouldn't want low-skilled immigrants to remain as a permanent underclass forever. If low-skilled immigrants are imported for the purpose of doing all the low-skilled jobs that supposedly no one else wants to do, leftists would start complaining within a generation or two that the country needs to have better policies to raise the social mobility of the recent low-skilled immigrants and their descendants.
It's mostly unfeasible to expect high social mobility from low IQ immigrants to begin with. But even if it were successful, it would imply that the country would have to import an endless stream of low-skilled immigrants every generation to refill the vacant low-skilled occupations, which isn't sustainable.
"Indeed, national IQ is positively correlated with almost everything good and negatively correlated with almost everything bad. We therefore shouldn’t be surprised that it’s the single best predictor of economic growth and also an excellent predictor of socioeconomic development."
This is a key point in the article.
"If we conduct a root cause analysis using data from the Fraser Institute, we see a clear directional link between economic freedom and civilizational growth."
I agree. My agreement above mainly refers to the first sentence of the paragraph. However, the wealth of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Botswana is unrelated to economic freedom; rather, it stems from their location atop vast oil fields and diamond deposits, respectively. On an individual basis, intelligence plays a relatively minor role in wealth gain. But on a national basis, intelligence plays a rather significant role in overall economic health due to technological advancements. But economic freedom is fundamental.
Why do you disagree? The 3 countries you mentioned are exceptions to the rule because of their resource wealth, and don't really produce exceptional individuals in scientific fields. The Korea example shows why economic systems are important, but out of two states with good systems in place, the higher IQ one will still do better. Could you clarify who you meant by "they score 70"?
I know not all countries blessed with natural resources are doing well. However, all three of your examples are relatively small in population. It says a lot that none of the top countries that people want to live in globally are in Africa. Sure, they can improve, but I doubt this is likely to make an African country a true player in world politics/economy. As with North Korea, high IQ is not a guarantee, but it sure is advantageous to possess it, as opposed to low or medium IQ. Despite some downsides, it is quite undeniable that people consider Japan, South Korea and many parts of China very attractive places to visit and even live in for a period of time if possible.
"This is what frustrates me I wish the Government would teach children economics."
Anything the government teaches will be to control you, not enlighten you.
Those in control want dissidence and agitation, which hinders attempts to remove those in power.
I know that Hanania is a race realist, but I don't know about Caplan. Does anybody know what Bryan Caplan's views on racial differences are?
Great article! This theme needs to be talked about more with receipts instead of leaving it to academics with pseudoscientific models. And it's terrible to always frame everything in terms of GDP, jobs and productivity.
In my experience, as an ex-expat living in my "home" country, the underappreciated externalities in the social sphere, which are hard to model and measure (data probably doesn't even exist), are boosting racism and intolerance as ordinary people feel unheard and people in Ivory towers don't live in the same shared spaces with recently arrived migrants.
Three small and innocuous examples come to mind: I've noticed the amount of trash on the streets in certain neighborhoods is indicative of the presence of migration (and it starts with litter and goes all the way up to washing machines/furniture, as well as dumping construction waste in wildlife adjacent spaces). I've also noticed there's also very little participation in community organizations and events (more from South American backgrounds, virtually nil from Middle East and African backgrounds). And lastly, the takeover and inappropriate use of green social spaces, rendering them unusable to locals (for instance: BBQs and parties in inappropriate places ruining them for everyone else).
And all of this saddens me as I've lived in a dozen countries across three continents, so I know the migrants who partake in the activities mentioned above don't represent what we'd describe as the middle class or higher socioeconomic strata from those cultures/societies.
The phrase I love is immigration is "Human Quantitative Rading".
How does someone end up thinking that *competent low-wage and manual labor* amounts to a national tragedy?
Exactly. Even an “incompetent” gardener can do a lot of damage to the plantings. Here one sees—and is warned—that improper pruning, feeding, and weeding destroys/damages one’s landscaping. We see it all the time in the neighborhood as there are much “day” laborers recruited for these type jobs.
One talks about the building “trades” still being in the domain of the native population. Well, not here—or anywhere in the Southwest. YouTube videos galore showing new construction done by incompetents in all the trades, and no, city-county code inspectors do not catch such.
Some general contractors putting up such “junk” have even refused potential buyers the right to inspect finished home construction *before* purchase—rather they claim all “defects” will be handled under their warranty. Fat chance.
This post is a series of strawman arguments, economic fallacies, warmed-over historical myths, and assertions, "if X, why don't you see Y," where Y is in fact true. "Why don't high-IQ people move to low-IQ countries?" They do, and more would do so if not for immigration restrictions. Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have IQs significantly higher than America's, yet far more people move to "low-IQ" America than go in the opposite direction. Within the United States, states with the highest average IQs, as proxied by student test scores, such as Massachusetts or Minnesota, have been losing population for a long time. Texas and Florida are consistently at the top of the list for internal migration despite mediocre test scores.
Whitfeld might counter that these counterexamples should not lead us to ignore the general trend, which is that more people move from low-IQ to high-IQ areas than in the opposite direction. But this alone does not imply what he thinks it does. If someone is more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people than 300 million low-IQ people, it does not follow that he won't be even more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people AND 300 million low-IQ people.
Whitfeld commits a sleight of hand in treating "low-IQ people drag down the average" as evidence that low-IQ people are a negative externality. To see the fallacy in this, imagine a hedge fund hires a second janitor to keep their office cleaner. The "average productivity" of the firm's employees will go down, but this is not evidence the janitor is negatively impacting the quants' productivity. The pro-immigration argument is that the firm's owners should be the ones to decide whether the janitor will improve the firm's productivity, not some bureaucrat with no skin in the game like Mr. Whitfeld. (Anti-discrimination law complicates this, but it would be better to fight that directly rather than argue for closed borders.)
Whitfeld asserts without evidence that slavery reduced productivity in the American South. If this is the case, it is odd that the white American South in 1860 was one of the richest societies the world had ever seen. Poorer than the North, yes, but richer than anywhere in Europe.
Whitfeld asserts that:
"And this is assuming that the "freeing up" of native workers is actually a good thing in the long run. Native workers displaced by immigrants who go apply for a higher-skilled job will be less skilled than the people who are currently working in that job—which is of course bad from the standpoint of the job's productivity."
This only applies if the 95 IQ Japanese moving into a job causes the 105 IQ Japanese to lose his job, the "lump of labor fallacy" that was debunked back in the 18th century. Whitfeld strawmans the pro-immigration side, attempting to put concessions in his opponents' mouths:
"Once you start getting into all the other issues like individual versus household level accounting, the cost of housing in cities, negative effects on wages, conflating GDP growth with economic gains to natives and country-of-origin effects, the typical mainstream economist will retreat to their last stand: abstract economic models, long-run "what-ifs", and elegant equations where immigration magically boosts national prosperity through indirect channels."
"The argument for mass immigration goes something like this: even if immigrants raise the cost of housing, compete with native workers and strain the welfare system, they still make the economy more "dynamic". Specifically, they free up high-skilled natives to focus on more complex work, boosting economic growth through specialization of labor."
I challenge Mr. Whitfeld to name one pro-immigration thinker who accepts that immigrants "raise the cost of housing." What he's doing here is projecting his zero-sum beliefs onto his opponents. Immigration supporters would respond that while immigrants raise the demand for housing, they also raise the supply of housing by building more housing. I do not believe Mr. Whitfeld could pass the ideological Turing Test as an advocate of freer immigration.
Mr. Whitfeld repeats the common canard that "cheap labor" is some Faustian bargain, good in the short run but bad in the long run because it discourages "innovation." If this were true, he ought to use this to get rich. Create a business and while your competitors are shooting the short-term heroin of "cheap labor," do the hard, long-term labor of innovation. Great wealth will eventually be yours.
> This post is a series of strawman arguments, economic fallacies, warmed-over historical myths, and assertions, "if X, why don't you see Y," where Y is in fact true. "Why don't high-IQ people move to low-IQ countries?" They do, and more would do so if not for immigration restrictions. Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have IQs significantly higher than America's, yet far more people move to "low-IQ" America than go in the opposite direction.
You're literally defeating your own point here. East Asian countries have much higher immigration restrictions than the United States do, even if every third worlder *wanted* to move to Japan, Korea, or Taiwan, they cannot. Secondly, the United States is not really "low IQ". Its NIQ is about 97.68, white Americans actually have a comparable NIQ to Northeast Asians. The average is weighed down by nonwhites, but nonetheless, America's IQ is not lower than most other Western nations. In fact, white Americans are some of the most intelligent white population in the entire world:
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1732244687929360434
No one claims sensible policies don't matter. It's true that white Americans historically and in contemporary times have always had a more economically libertarian attitude, and with a culture that prioritizes liberty and individualism, is also a good foundation for potential innovators and geniuses. But this is because the white sample in the United States is exceptional, so let's not kid ourselves and think that when the richest country in the entire world opened up to the globe beginning in 1965 that the reason why everyone wanted to move there is thanks to the great efforts of some Mexican in Arizona.
> Within the United States, states with the highest average IQs, as proxied by student test scores, such as Massachusetts or Minnesota, have been losing population for a long time. Texas and Florida are consistently at the top of the list for internal migration despite mediocre test scores.
This is genuinely embarrassing. Yes, people move away from blue to red states, no one denies that bad policy is also bad for the economy. Yes, people enjoy the better housing, better tax laws, and fewer regulations in red states, and when they do move, what kinds of neighborhoods do you think they end up in? You think the first destination is a majority-Hispanic or majority-black county? Let's not kid ourselves here, we all know what "white flight" is. In fact, white flight itself as a phenomenon is hard for pro-immigration advocates to reconcile with their narratives. Here is this beneficial complementary labor coming in to supposedly enrich white people's standards of living, and yet they run away from it. Paradoxical truly. Of course, once you consider the fact that the immigration debate is being distorted by the way immigration reduces internal mobility and the cost of that, then actually this makes perfect sense:
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/fleeing-opportunity
Ironically enough, you have made yet another excellent argument against immigration. One of the greatest virtues of the federalist system of the United States was that it provided a sort of self-correcting mechanism when it came to policymaking. After all, people can simply leave a state that has implemented poor policies in favor of a state with better policies. Due to self-selection, internal migration of existing residents will come from those who are more politically aligned with the new areas they move into (as well as some minor effect of ideological conversion). Over time, the electorate would shift to give more weight and power to the party responsible for pushing the good policies, and the other party would have to adopt better positions if it wishes to remain politically viable. Immigrants eliminate this self-correction mechanism, making it feasible for a party who pushes bad policies to remain in power because they can choose to either maintain the population of states with bad policy or move into a good state and then wreck it politically. A bad state doesn't need to compete with a good state, it just needs to remain better than the shithole the migrants come from, and it would maintain Democratic power over the electorate, while in the absence of immigration, internal migration would actually result in more policies that libertarians support.
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/wrecking-the-laboratories-of-democracy
> Whitfeld might counter that these counterexamples should not lead us to ignore the general trend, which is that more people move from low-IQ to high-IQ areas than in the opposite direction. But this alone does not imply what he thinks it does. If someone is more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people than 300 million low-IQ people, it does not follow that he won't be even more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people AND 300 million low-IQ people.
It quite literally does, unless you believe that variation within countries don't exist. A hypothetical where you have a country comprised of 300 million high IQ and 300 million low IQ individuals would mean a country of 600 million people where the average IQ is intermediate. The real world analogy to this would be any second world country with a large population.
Since smart fractions are less predictive than average NIQ for differences in economic well-being between countries, it would imply that a country with 1) very high IQ inequality, and 2) a large residual smart fraction is not more important or better than simply a country with a high average IQ.
https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/the-case-for-border-control
> Whitfeld commits a sleight of hand in treating "low-IQ people drag down the average" as evidence that low-IQ people are a negative externality. To see the fallacy in this, imagine a hedge fund hires a second janitor to keep their office cleaner. The "average productivity" of the firm's employees will go down, but this is not evidence the janitor is negatively impacting the quants' productivity.
Ironically enough, this demonstrates you don't even know what economists mean when I said that. In pro-immigration circles, when immigrants crowd out a native worker, the native is "freed up" to go apply for a better and more complex job. The problem with this is that immigrants typically crowd out a comparable worker (i.e., mostly low-skilled workers), so that worker who then goes to apply for a "high-skilled" occupation has lower skill than the current workers in that occupation. If you actually understood what I meant (which you evidently did not), the analogy would be more like this: a police department hires a new officer who is incompetent at the job. He loses the evidence often, commonly fails to catch and arrest the suspect, is too gullible and tricked by smooth-talkers, etc., which frequently ropes other officers into his cases in the process. Or, a cleaning department hires a new janitor who doesn't do a very thorough job. During the mopping process, he pushes the gunk onto the edges of the walls, which results in the department having to call a wall repair service more frequently.
Your example, meanwhile, of a company delegating very specific roles to everyone, also works in a country with zero immigrants.
> Whitfeld asserts without evidence that slavery reduced productivity in the American South. If this is the case, it is odd that the white American South in 1860 was one of the richest societies the world had ever seen. Poorer than the North, yes, but richer than anywhere in Europe.
If you agree that the American South would have been better off economically if they accepted industrialization like the North had early on and ditched slavery, then you agree that slavery did in fact reduce their productivity. Differences between countries do not necessarily have to be explained by the same causes as differences within countries. Enslaved blacks saw rapid socioeconomic convergence with their Northern counterparts once slavery was abolished. Despite this, enslaved blacks also had better standards of living than many European countries at the time, but you would obviously be dishonest to propose from the rapid catch-up of Southern blacks to Northern blacks that having slavery is no worse than not having slavery for their prospects.
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/black-economic-progress-after-slavery
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YxCHqUbc3DbUU0T2oT92i-42gCIAPzUR/view
Part 2 of the reply:
> This only applies if the 95 IQ Japanese moving into a job causes the 105 IQ Japanese to lose his job, the "lump of labor fallacy" that was debunked back in the 18th century.
Confident assertions! Firstly, no, a 95 IQ Japanese can make it worse for every other 105 Japanese person working the same job as long as he's worse at the job, which he almost certainly is, because everyone will suddenly have to accommodate his little screw-ups and flaws. Secondly, you seem to not even understand what "lump of labor" even means. The so-called "lump of labor fallacy" refers to incorrectly attempting to assess economic effects from a view that the total number of jobs in an economy is fixed, it actually has nothing to do with the "positive crowd-out" I'm referring to. In fact, "positive crowd-out" is perfectly compatible with flexible number of jobs. We can imagine in a hypothetical where a new job opening occurs for a higher-skilled job because the migrant picking tomatoes "freed" up a native to do something else with his life, so this native doesn't take the job of any other native, versus one where the native does replace another native. In both scenarios, the inefficiencies I described earlier in my reply would still exist. Thirdly, handwaving something by calling it a fallacy when you don't even understand the concept, beyond obviously not being a good look on your part, is also mildly intellectually dishonest. In reality, the "lump of labor" fallacy is not so much a fallacy as it is a circumstantial caveat. Yes, the economy is not permanently fixed, but many factors can make the adjustment process slower or the effect of displacement worse. To quote from the piece where I had covered this briefly:
"We know that immigrant settlement patterns aren’t random but based on the local opportunities available (Kim & Sakamoto, 2013), meaning that these sorts of shocks to natives are occurring in relatively nice locations with high opportunity. Unsurprisingly then, in not just the United States but across countries with high levels of immigration, we can see that citizens are moving from areas of high productivity to areas of low productivity.
{Insert Figure 28 from the paper}
Note: GVA per worker = “gross value added per worker”. Notice that in various countries, the GVA per worker is negatively correlated with the internal mobility rate, implying that in these countries, citizens move towards relatively less productive areas. From Stansbury et al. (2023).
With this, we now have a potential mechanism for the displacement effect to persist, and in fact, there’s evidence that it does. Kim & Sakamoto had also analyzed the long-term effects of immigration on native wages in both two-digit and one-digit occupations from 1994 to 2006. The results from the occupation-level approach are presented on the right side, and we can see that the negative effect remained.
{Insert Table 4 from the paper}
An excellent study which specifically looks at the effect of immigrants on native wages and accounts for the internal mobility of natives is Price et al. (2023). The authors explored what happened to native “movers” and “stayers” when immigrants moved in. After controlling for natives that were displaced as well as selective in-migration, the stayers did not see an income gain. Young workers were tracked for thirty years and were found to have suffered a persistent income loss that had not recovered, and among the ones that were displaced, their losses were twice as large as non-movers.2
{Insert Figure 5 from the paper}
And remember, in the modern context, natives are forced into areas that are worse than what they started off with in terms of opportunities, so we have no reason to expect that things got any better for them. Displacement aside, another interesting consideration is that of monopsonies and their ability to use immigrants to reduce the bargaining power of native workers, resulting in much slower wage adjustments than is traditionally assumed. Indeed, the Amior & Manning study considered this possibility, finding that “Based on our estimates, the expansion of native mark-downs (in response to migration) dominates the aggregate gains in marginal products. As a result, the average native wage declines, even in a “long run” setting with elastic capital. Though aggregate native income grows (due to the transfer of migrants’ rents), more than 100% of these gains go to profits, as the increased mark-downs redistribute income from workers to firms” (p. 39).
So while the pie might not be literally fixed, it certainly seems that it’s possible for the adjustment process to be slow enough to cause long-term pain for the natives affected."
https://hereticalinsights.substack.com/p/the-price-of-racial-diversity
And to quote the X/Twitter user @AnechoicMedia_:
"The "fixed pie" is the more correct worldview for many companies that dominate today.
Most specific companies and their founders don't matter that much to people not invested in them specifically. The economic activity they preside over was inevitable and it's only a zero-sum question of who captures the market. The model of being a top business today has been to capture some conduit of economic activity, rather than being a manufacturer of widgets.
This is most true in the case of social media companies, which exist to maximize engagement and sell ads. The rise of a new media platform just re-routes a limited pool of attention to a new fiefdom. If any one founder of the site-that-would-be-twitter didn't exist, it's not like the economic activity represented by twitter ceases to exist from that timeline. But the people in charge do matter to the rules that are in place and what content gets promoted, so handing control of your media to foreigners loses native editorial control while creating no new value.
The same is true of much of the tech world that exists as extensions of physical services. Something like Uber was inevitable as soon as the smartphone proliferated. Ride-sharing systems with electronic reputation management was imagined by writers as early as the 1970s. The smartphone made this politically unstoppable, and it was only a question of which company would scramble fastest to grab the market, by the most legally questionable means.
If you add a hundred new genius "founders" to America, there's not going to be a hundred Ubers or Twitters because the market was only ever going to support a particular concentration of firms, a certain amount of user engagement, a certain amount of consumer spending to collect fees on. As an American it's more important that the set of institutions enabled by present technology end up being controlled by people who share your values."
https://x.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1873310906416824660
> I challenge Mr. Whitfeld to name one pro-immigration thinker who accepts that immigrants "raise the cost of housing."
Firstly, very amusing proposition that I have to name someone who has every bit of ideological motivation to deny this, apparently a restrictionist argument is only acceptable if a xenophile agrees with it but not the other way around, seems mildly unfair. But secondly, I accept your challenge. Behold, Alex Nowrasteh from the Cato Institute in his piece "JD Vance Is Correct: Immigration Increases Housing Prices, and That’s Okay": https://www.cato.org/blog/jd-vance-correct-immigration-increases-housing-prices-thats-ok
Obviously, Nowrasteh spends a long portion of the article explaining why in his magical world, raising housing prices is actually not a problem. We can of course get into the empirical debate about whether or not an immigrant's effect on the prices is greater or less than their effect on demand for housing, that's a perfectly fine discussion to be had on its own, but since your only challenge here was asking me to "name one pro-immigration thinker who accepts that immigrants "raise the cost of housing"", I believe I have done a satisfactory job.
> I do not believe Mr. Whitfeld could pass the ideological Turing Test as an advocate of freer immigration.
Evidently, you are much better at describing yourself than you are at describing me.
> Mr. Whitfeld repeats the common canard that "cheap labor" is some Faustian bargain, good in the short run but bad in the long run because it discourages "innovation." If this were true, he ought to use this to get rich. Create a business and while your competitors are shooting the short-term heroin of "cheap labor," do the hard, long-term labor of innovation. Great wealth will eventually be yours.
Ah, nice job raising the bar for being a valid authority figure on anything, now we're straight up invoking genetic fallacies. White liberals who insist that immigration is absolutely wonderful and an unquestionable good live in areas that are so white that one would need binoculars to find a Mexican roaming around and pay a premium to send their kids to private schools that have close to zero migrant students. There is a clear discrepancy between what people claim and how they actually behave. Not surprising that they're the same group of people who accuse white conservatives of being racists and then avoid diverse areas as much as them while also engaging in white flight even *more* than them.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/white-progressives-more-likely-to-flee-diverse-neighborhoods
I don't have time to respond to all of these, but I'll note that "white flight" means "white flight from blacks" 90% of the time. There is no Hispanic equivalent of Detroit or Baltimore. Immigration restrictionism is fueled by people treating the entire non-white world as if they are American blacks, which they are not in either their propensity to commit crimes, their voting behavior, or the degree to which they drive white people out of areas. And as for white flight from blacks, while it existed before 1964, it only became endemic with the Civil Rights Act. It was not a "market failure" caused by the free movement of people, it was a result of heavy-handed government intervention. Liberty is the solution.
> I'll note that "white flight" means "white flight from blacks" 90% of the time. There is no Hispanic equivalent of Detroit or Baltimore. Immigration restrictionism is fueled by people treating the entire non-white world as if they are American blacks, which they are not in either their propensity to commit crimes, their voting behavior, or the degree to which they drive white people out of areas.
Do you just like being wrong? Whites flee from Hispanics too. First paper:
"Using geo-linked data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the decennial census, we compare probabilities of neighborhood out-migration for Anglos, blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans by varying ethno-racial neighborhood compositions. Analyses for Latinos are disaggregated by nativity status. **The results indicate that Anglos have a higher likelihood of moving when they have many minority neighbors and there is little difference whether minority neighbors are black or Latino**."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11113-008-9101-x
Second paper:
"We found that one-third of districts experienced rising enrollments of Latino children of at least 250 children between 2000 and 2015 (32 percent of the 4,293 districts). Among suburban districts meeting this growth threshold (n = 656), White enrollments grew in just 131 districts and fell in the remaining 525—evincing a contemporary version of White flight."
https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/9/2/104
> And as for white flight from blacks, while it existed before 1964, it only became endemic with the Civil Rights Act.
I am not sure what exactly telling me "blacks suck, and they sucked more once you can't disassociate from them completely" is supposed to prove. I do not recall disagreeing with this.
> It was not a "market failure" caused by the free movement of people, it was a result of heavy-handed government intervention.
Evidently, this "free movement of people", whether it's in a situation where people can freely disassociate or the government tries to force integration, white people don't want to be around blacks (and Hispanics). When given the freedom the choose, or when attempted coercion by the government is tried, whites find ways to leave. So really, the lesson here is that there's no way to resolve the issue that blacks (and Hispanics) are not so good for the well-being of white people, there's only the extent to which damage control can be implemented (fleeing from them). I honestly am perplexed and wonder if you even tried to think out your response before sending it.
> Liberty is the solution.
Which was not remotely proven at all in this attempt at a response. Ironically, even more good arguments against immigration, because now we're really playing mental gymnastics.
"See, if you just have a low-skilled group complement the high-skilled group, everyone will be better off. No? Oh, okay fine, not *that* low-skilled, they can't be too different. I mean something intermediate, like Hispanics. Oh, whites respond poorly to Hispanics too? They would still pay a premium to not enjoy the benefits of labor specialization? What? If there were no foreigners here in the first place, no one would even have to think about how to deal with the issue of white flight? Well, umm... just let people move around you bigot!"
Your argument for how Hispanics don't create a Detroit or Baltimore is literally because their IQ disparity with whites is less dramatic so their shitholes are less shitty in comparison to blacks. You are implicitly recognizing here that perhaps so-called labor segmentation from large IQ/ability group inequality is not inherently worth it because your example relies on picking a group which has about half the average group difference in IQ as between blacks and whites, which should also reduce the amount of segmentation that occurs.
Firstly, what the authors *think* is the cause has nothing to do with the actual cause. The authors of the first paper can *claim* it's due to racism, but that's an empirical question on its own. Speaking of the empirical question of racism, since you raised all these historical grievances with blacks, the reality is that slavery did not have any lasting impact on the socioeconomic livelihood of blacks in the United States. They caught up to their Northern counterparts rapidly following emancipation and the gaps closed (but not with whites, consistent with the hereditarian hypothesis).
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/black-economic-progress-after-slavery
There is actually very little evidence that blacks were ever discriminated against historically. I have a long post analyzing discrimination against blacks throughout American history including both government and individual-level discrimination here:
https://hereticalinsights.substack.com/p/how-bad-was-anti-black-discrimination
> That study didn’t control for neighborhood crime rates, levels of education.
That would actually be inappropriate to do so because in the context here, on the discourse of positive complementary effects of immigration, labor segmentation *requires* that two groups differ in their average ability so that they specialize into different roles. If you want a multiple regression to test for white flight after a bunch of controls, that would be cool and all, but you would be arguing against a different point not relevant to my article at all.
> or preconceived biases
Preconceived biases or "implicit biases" are delusional leftist cope and basically have no actual predictive validity in acting discriminatory towards another group:
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/dv8tu_v1
More stuff on racial bias and supposed historical discrimination: https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/american-racism-and-the-anti-white-left/
> This doesn’t mean Anglo-Saxons inherently want to move away from ethnic minorities. What it does mean is that racist preconceptions can lead to a reification of behavioral traits.
I am of the perception that white people were not that good at being properly racist throughout history and certainly today they are the most awful at it except to themselves. However, even *if* we suppose that it were the case, well, the trend has continued to this day.
> If people believe blacks are criminals, they’re more likely to leave those neighborhoods. Conversely, if they don’t hold those views, they’re less likely to leave.
And of course, the irony of you saying this is that, as I've mentioned already, white liberals are actually more likely to engage in white flight than white conservatives, so racism seems like a poor explanation even as a basic litmus test.
> Why is Argentina quickly becoming very rich if Hispanics are supposedly "dumb"? Why is a great leader, Javier Milei—God bless his name—making that place a beautiful paradise, while Russia, much closer to Northern Europeans, has homelands that look like utter shitholes and are declining?
I do not know what you think "becoming rich" means. Milei's accomplishment has been bringing inflation down. Claiming Argentina is "becoming rich" is an incredibly generous statement. Argentina's per capita GDP is comparable to its neighbors and significantly lower than Russia's, so I really have no clue where this claim is coming from.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank
> Also, why is Botswana rich if Africans are supposedly deficient in IQ? Why is Botswana super rich?
Evidently, you have not even tried to check your own claims before posting them. It's neat though that Russia, Argentina, and Botswana rank-order in their per capita GDP exactly as would be predicted by their NIQs.
> You have no arguments, and you misrepresent your own data to fit your preconceived delusions.
I feel like I've said 'projection' one too many times already in this thread.
> The vast majority of scholars don’t even accept race as a concept, and I’m sorry, this isn’t an appeal to authority.
There's no expert consensus on this, you quite literally made that up. Why make claims like these when you're not even going to bother to fact-check them first? There are surveys out there for this purpose, but you evidently do not know this. Speaking of "experts", a supermajority of experts in intelligence research also believe that the black-white IQ gap is at least partly mediated by genetic differences:
https://werkat.substack.com/p/expert-opinion-on-race-iq-their-validity
> An appeal to authority only applies when they aren’t experts in the field.
If you want to redefine the actual definition of appeal to authority which can be found from five seconds of Google searching to make yourself feel better, I can't stop you. It just simply isn't one anyone debating argumentative fallacies actually use. Even if that weren't the case, expert opinion is only valid insofar as being an expert is actually close to being correct. In practice, experts are terrible at predicting things, don't understand basic statistical concepts, and peer review is awful at quality checking:
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2020/06/25/on-trusting-academic-experts/
"Within the United States, states with the highest average IQs, as proxied by student test scores, such as Massachusetts or Minnesota, have been losing population for a long time."
The claim that Massachusetts and Minnesota have the highest IQ scores has always lacked credibility. Someone of good repute should look into how this age-old claim is substantiated.
> "If someone is more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people than 300 million low-IQ people, it does not follow that he won't be even more productive in a country of 300 million high-IQ people AND 300 million low-IQ people"
Setting aside the incredibly dubious economic logic here, what happens to the economy if there's an ethnic civil war between the high and low-IQ populations?
Hanania & Caplan empathize with the ugliness of the low.
Whitfeld courageously blocked me on his own substack, so I'll just reiterate here that I'm very skeptical that "immigration inhibits automation" is an argument for less migration. The obesity epidemic and TFR decline is almost certainly a downstream consequence of the shift from an agriculture + manufacturing economy to an urbanised services-based economy, for example.
Friedrich List, a German liberal in exile in America was inspired by Alexander Hamilton’s and Henry Clay’s American System to research the economic history of England, Hanseatic League, and others to draw practical lessons in industrial development policies in his 1844 landmark book “Political Economy”. Unlike his rivals Adam Smith and Karl Marx, he started with the actual history, not ideal abstractions. He’s so influential that even Lenin, Stalin, Deng shifted their countries away from classical Marxism to Listian policy to develop their economy away from agriculture to industrial power. China and America before 1970 were the most successful cases. He needed to be more widely known today.
"compete with native workers"
Why is this obviously bad? It sucks for those who's wages decline, but from the buyers perspective, competition among workers should put downward pressure on wages, and so lower the cost of goods / services.
I don't buy into the "artificially restrict labour available so as to inflate local wages" approach as being obviously net beneficial.
You’re referring to the “immigrant surplus”, which is what I meant at the start of this article when it comes to conflating GDP growth with gains to natives. Here’s the relevant part about this that I wrote in another piece:
“In economics, while immigrants depress the wages of competing workers, firms benefit from being able to employ labor at cheaper costs, and some consumers gain from cheaper goods and services. The net gain from subtracting the winners’ gains and the losers’ losses is referred to as the “immigrant surplus”. In practice, this surplus is extremely small, just 2.2% of the increase in GDP, while the rest of the benefit goes to the immigrants themselves as wages and benefits (Borjas, 2013). If it isn’t obvious already, this small surplus covers up a massive bottom-up wealth redistribution from workers to employers, though with some benefit to consumers. Now, of course, this model is sensitive to the assumptions employed. Amior & Manning (2024) focused on the way monopsonies influenced the market dynamics of migrant and native workers. Since monopsonies have significant market power to influence wages, employers do not feel as much pressure to adjust wages quickly based on supply and demand. Under this model, both the wage reduction and the immigrant surplus would become larger than under the assumption of perfect competition. Aside from these two studies, the famous and highly cited 2017 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine had estimated that the actual “benefit” of immigration to the native-born could be $54.2 billion a year. The authors don’t demonstrate how they got this number, but they provide all the information necessary to calculate it. In short, this “benefit” to the natives would come from reducing the wages of native workers who are in competition with immigrants by $439.4 billion annually, but the gain to businesses would be $548.1 billion, which would create a net “benefit” of $54.2 billion to natives. Whether or not most people would consider this a benefit, however, might be a slightly different story. Still, even this is probably overstating the ‘benefit’ of migrants, as it cannot account for the various indirect impacts that this large-scale bottom-up wealth redistribution has. For instance, natives whose prospects are hurt by migrants and leave their local area are also probably more likely to end up on welfare afterward, but the formula for calculating the immigrant surplus does not capture this, so in practice, the immigrant surplus is closer to $0 or even negative.”
In fact, assuming that the *only* effect of bottom-up redistribution is just more welfare use from native workers who were hurt and nothing else (this is an extremely charitable assumption but let’s grant it here), if every crowded-out native used a couple thousand dollars more of welfare each year, that entirely offsets the surplus. And again, this is assuming that increased welfare usage is the *only* side effect.
Interesting! Thanks for sharing the excerpt.
As a follow up, is it your belief that the potential downside suffered by natives is enough to outweigh the obvious benefit gained by the immigrants (i.e. their income being multiplied by 5 or 10x or 15x)?
https://youtu.be/LPjzfGChGlE?feature=shared
For the record, I am not against helping people outside of my own country. But, I do believe immigration as a solution is misguided and will actually make the entire world worse off in the long run (poor countries currently also depend on the technological innovations of intelligent countries, keeping intelligent countries as prosperous and differentiated as possible will have benefits of diffusion to the rest of the world). It will probably be best for the sake of world peace to stabilize the situation of the third world. Read this to understand the implications of complete freedom of movement: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2025/02/end-stage-global-capitalism/
To be clear, I didn't think you would be against helping people outside of your own country.
The video seems somewhat orthogonal to the point I was making since it can both be true that (a) immigration to the US (since that was the example used) has a negligible impact on reducing world poverty and (b) the benefit gained by those who do immigrate from impoverished / poorly run countries to wealthy / well run countries is greater than the downside suffered by the native population of the wealthy country in question. Assuming b is true, then allowing immigrants to move from their impoverished countries to the US or Japan would be net positive (even if it does have a net negative impact on the native population) and worth doing.
As I understand your view, you don't believe that would be the case with low-IQ immigrants (though perhaps you do think high-IQ immigrants are beneficial to the economy, as Borjas (2013) concludes) since the low-IQ immigrants have some negative societal effect (a higher rate of accepting bribes than the native population, possibly causing lower rates of automatisation) that aren't offset by their economic contributions.
I find the point on keeping countries as "prosperous and differentiated as possible will have benefits of diffusion to the rest of the world" a little hand-wavy. One can allow in large sums of immigrants without threatening the established institutions (see the Gulf States as a partial example). What is the causal chain by which allowing in low IQ immigrants reduces technological innovations? Presumably these people won't end up in Moderna or SpaceX or whatever, since they won't surpass the credential barrier. Even if employers suck at identifying productive workers, some crude measures will probably avoid the potential downsides here. Is it something like "well, they increase corruption and overall damage the fabric of society sufficiently such that running the business and institutes that make technological progress becomes impossible"?
On Kirkegaard's piece:
"Most ethnics marry within their group, but not all of them, and all of them engage in some level of outbreeding. If we wait long enough (100s of years), there will be genetic panmixia. In that world, there will be no purebred ethnics left, and no high or low intelligence genetic clusters as we see now. "
This seems suspect? What happened to assortative mating? How does this claim square with countries having existed in one form or another for several hundred years and still managing to possess distinct ethnic groups?
> the benefit gained by those who do immigrate from impoverished / poorly run countries to wealthy / well run countries is greater than the downside suffered by the native population of the wealthy country in question. Assuming b is true, then allowing immigrants to move from their impoverished countries to the US or Japan would be net positive (even if it does have a net negative impact on the native population) and worth doing.
The gain to migrants can also only exist if the destination country is better than the one they come from (obviously). The problem is migrants make the destination country ever more like the host country, so the gains for future waves are eventually going to diminish and then there simply won't be any at all.
If you want to help them, it should not come at the expense of those already here. It’s not at all obvious why their well-being should take precedence over natives. It is possible to improve their quality of life in their own countries without destroying our own, and that’s what I support. People who claim to be highly compassionate are almost never the ones who lose anything for this supposed humanitarian kindness they preach; they just let poor Americans bear the brunt of the negative effects of migrants while they themselves live in some gated community which is basically a miniature version of a white ethnostate.
> As I understand your view, you don't believe that would be the case with low-IQ immigrants (though perhaps you do think high-IQ immigrants are beneficial to the economy, as Borjas (2013) concludes) since the low-IQ immigrants have some negative societal effect (a higher rate of accepting bribes than the native population, possibly causing lower rates of automatisation) that aren't offset by their economic contributions.
High IQ immigration has its own problems, mostly political, which eventually translates downstream into indirect costs (Aporia has published the relevant pieces on those by Arctotherium, you can search for it yourself). Possibly one can work out a way to make it work, but a first step towards doing that is recognizing that "Immigrasia" does not exist. There is no country where all the immigrants come from, immigrants are not a homogenous sample, so when we discuss immigration, the immediate question to ask should be "immigrants from where"?
> I find the point on keeping countries as "prosperous and differentiated as possible will have benefits of diffusion to the rest of the world" a little hand-wavy. One can allow in large sums of immigrants without threatening the established institutions (see the Gulf States as a partial example).
The problem with the gulf states example is that the reason why the gulf states work is because they're despotic states with draconian laws where citizenship is almost impossible to get and foreign workers are basically cannon fodder. Sure, in such a system, you can argue that immigration *could* work, but the problem is everyone who pushes for open borders (mostly libertarians and leftists) want to get the benefit of open borders as with the gulf states without adopting the style of governance of gulf states because they like freedom or liberal democracy. Fundamentally, those are incompatible stances.
Proposition (open borders + citizenship apartheid) ≠ Proposition (open borders)
I can personally grant that if you implemented segregation or apartheid in the West, we can negotiate more low-skilled workers, but if you’re willing to accept this proposal to make open borders work, you are obviously in the slim slim minority of open border advocates.
> What is the causal chain by which allowing in low IQ immigrants reduces technological innovations?
Resources wasted. If the government could have spent a set amount each year on R&D research but had to siphon a portion of it away for social services to accommodate migrants, that's an example of reducing innovation. Any inefficiencies they are responsible for that diverts resources could have gone to innovation. But let's use a simpler example besides innovation to illustrate the same idea: nobody likes getting into accidents, both because it's expensive and presumably because you don't want to die. The likelihood of you getting into say a car accident is a function of three things: your ability to drive properly (positively correlated with IQ), the the ability of everyone around you to drive properly (also positively correlated with IQ), and how well the roads are maintained (government and private spending). Even if you had incredible driving skills (high IQ and practice), if everyone around you are awful drivers who should've had their licenses revoked (low IQ), and the roads are full of cracks and holes (the government siphoned some of the money for road maintenance to pay for social services), your risk of getting into an accident also increases. This is probably not a good thing.
However, negative externalities on innovation is not limited to low-skilled migrants. Foreign students are notorious for engaging in academic fraud, which is obviously not good for innovation if reviewers have to go through more trouble with retractions and investigations. There is another aspect to this, which is that our foreign students are largely from China and India, and surveys shows that nearly all of them share technological insight with their peers back in their home countries. If all you care about is global prosperity, this is not necessarily bad, but for people who would like the United States to maintain its competitive edge against China, this is of course very bad. So, migration is also a way for opponents to narrow the technological gap with the West.
> This seems suspect? What happened to assortative mating?
Assortative mating exists but it is not perfect. It is actually astonishingly weak for many personality traits, meta-analytic literature puts it at around 0.3-0.4 between couples. Genius can be thought of as an interaction effect between extremely high IQ and the right personality, the fact that assortative mating is not strong with regards to personality screws with the likelihood of producing a genius. Miscegenation also blurs racial boundaries, so even if we had some whites who preferred dating whites over nonwhites, the blurring of racial boundaries will make it more acceptable for those whites to mate with "white-passing" clines that will eventually result in genomic extinction. It's also a simple fact of population biology that uniform mixing between originally differentiated populations results in some loss of the original genetic diversity.
> How does this claim square with countries having existed in one form or another for several hundred years and still managing to possess distinct ethnic groups?
I am not sure what examples you have in mind specifically. People in historical times were also far more implicitly prejudiced against other groups of people and any sort of "marrying out" was generally frowned upon.
We’re going to replace you with robot slaves.
What if goods and services are already cheap, but wages are low relative to the cost of housing/education/healthcare?
Yes, this is a clear case wherein Economic Theory is a lot more ambiguous about a topic than the impression given by Economic Policy pundits
There's an important point regarding the Economic arguments for loosening immigration: "labor shortages" is a euphemism for "wages are too low"
In a free market, long term labor shortages shouldn't happen - wages should rise until more of the native population enters that workforce, and this proceeds until a new equilibrium with both more workers employed as well as higher wages are realized.
Instead of importing workers to fill a labor shortages, why not figure out the reasons for structurally depressed wages in the first place?
(the answer, of course, includes a lot of the parasitic regulatory functions of progressive policy, which is why this question is not explored)
Discussed in more detail here:
https://philomaticalgorhythms.substack.com/p/on-inequality