Except economies of scale absolutely still matters. The reason why America is a superpower while Canada is not is because America has a much bigger population, which leads to more diverse industries, more complete supply chains, and obviously a bigger military.
The per capita GDP difference between US and other western countries can largely be attributed to the dominance of the US dollar, which gives the average American more buying power internationally than the average German or Canadian. And the dominance of the USD is downstream from US being a large and dominant superpower.
The biggest problems with immigration are productivity and assimilation, but both are solvable problems. Productivity can be solved by focusing on high skill immigration. Assimilation can be solved by preferring younger immigrants who have been educated in the US, as well as cutting back on family-based visas so that high skill immigrate workers will be forced to assimilate through intermarriage with natives instead of bringing spouses from their home countries.
No, you ignore what truly matters, countries like Switzerland (8.7 million) and Luxembourg (660,000) have much smaller populations yet boast some of the highest per capita GDPs in the world—$87,963 and $128,823 respectively in 2023, compared to the U.S.’s $81,695 (IMF estimates). While, China and India, with populations exceeding 1.4 billion each, have only recently begun to challenge U.S. dominance, and their per capita GDPs ($13,136 and $2,845) lag far behind. Clearly, population size doesn’t guarantee superpower status or economic prosperity.
Having big military is important, but for Europe that is partially solved by alliances, and tech innovations (modern drone warfare doesn't require as much boots on the ground). And of course, as stated by the author, the point of having a military is protection of nation's wealth, land, it's sovereignty, etc. Allowing mass immigration is giving it all away "without a fight".
And rarely openly discussed but very painful and important issue: as the migrant workers are always hugely disproportionately males (sometimes up to 90%), while the base male to female ration in the host country is always at around 50/50, those "young workers" will create an imbalance. The fact is, native men would never willingly put themselves in the situation where they have less opportunities and higher competition. In the end you will end up with the number of lonely men almost equivalent to the number of immigrant young workers. This of course leads to societal tensions, breeds resentment, possible ethnic conflicts, a rise of xenophobia, extremism etc.
And we already have too many examples (mainly from Western Europe) where large influxes of single male migrants have caused a huge increase in sexual crimes (for obvious reasons, young men have urges).
When we compound everything stated, it seems to me that only a malign actor would advocate for such an immigration policy.
All things being equal population size matters. Nothing is guaranteed of course. Luxembourg and Switzerland as examples are silly. It’s basically a gathering of rich people (who made their fortune elsewhere )and bankers. What’s the economy of these countries? What do they produce?
Great article. I agree with every point being made here, and I also appreciate the sensible comparison of AI-risk with much existentially safer bio-enhancement options.
The age of mass migration is over. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay there and work to improve their living conditions.
Immigration has never been about anything other than creating a permanent government dependent underclass for the uniparty to exploit for votes and create internal chaos to increase their control.
When being an American is an abstract idea, not an actual people, it gives the government the excuse to treat the citizens as subjects. If all being American means is an abstract set of liberal values, then the government does not have to concern themselves with the well being of the people they govern. Even more sinisterly, their own personal ambitions and interest just happen to align with the abstract values they feel responsible for.
The only “economic” way to do mass migration is something similar to UAE system for guest workers, i. e. they come in, they work, they leave without any possibility of a permanent status.
Immigration worshippers in the West don’t actually care about economic arguments, sadly.
They have no political rights, there are no elections, they are not allowed into the security services or military (not allowed to get their hands on the guns).
Interesting, although I think geographic location has more to do with voting patterns of immigrants than genetics. For example, how many of those Democrat white Catholics and Jews were urban people? I'm guessing all of them.
It seems to me voting tendencies are more impacted by the rural/urban divide than anything else. I live in a rural area, and people of Anglo, Italian, Irish, German descent all vote the same way, whereas our urban cousins vote very differently.
It might solve population decline for certain parties or groups with strikingly low birthrates and political ambitions which stretch decades into the future...
Correct. Immigration doesn’t ‘solve’ Population Decline.
Immigration is a Hail Mary Pass, which juices up Consumption & stabilizes the Median Age & the Labour Pool *for a while* until things Decline again.
But the overall numbers on the Median Age & Dependency ratios are a few percentage points max... Which the author correctly notes in this piece.
The author’s optimism about Japan is ill-founded; quite a few essays have been written on why both Japan & South Korea are tech Dystopias in the classical sense of the word... & not worth living in, given the fact that you overwork yourself to death in said societies for Oligarchs.
“Hoping technological advances bail us out” is Hopium without much substance.
As for raising Birth Rates... that will only work for a while in select contexts & locations, given Biocapacity loss. However, that will only last for a while at most.
But yes... there are no solutions here for Ecological Overshoot & its ensuing Second-Order Effects, such as Population Decline, Energy-Material shortfalls, etc. Overshoot is a Predicament with Terms of Surrender, & not a Problem ‘that can be solved.’
Great article. Some things to also ponder: GDP measures are crap, and even income, tax, and redistribution numbers per capita are not that great, since you cant really measure someones actual real contribution to a society based off of that. To give some extreme exaples, let’s say you imported a bunch of immigrants who were dumb but particularly saintly. They never could earn that much money. Having them would be a net positive for a country even if it were expensive. (It would also probably be a net negative for them to immigrate if the place they came from was better in moral terms and moving corroded what was good about them over time). This example also gives the lie to the argument of the USCCB about wanting so many immigrants and claiming it is wrong for us to turn them away. By Catholic teaching it is better to be poor and good, even if it kills you than richer and turn bad. Immigrating to america makes things religiously worse for catholics who move from catholic countries, particularly in the 2nd and subsequent generations. Idk if that’s always been the case but it certainly is today.
Another example would be if you had a bunch of immigrants that did high value things for not much money. So to give a sort of extreme example lets say you had a bunch of immigrants that made oil extraction cheaper and it also depressed the price of oil, and your oil sector as measured gets less profitable, but also you get it cheaper. As an input it has more value than its price, or else people wouldnt use it, and it goes into everything. Such immigrants in this scenario would be a net positive even if the surface numbers made it look negative.
Both examples I listed are kindof extreme and unrealistic, as the saints would probably be extremely right coded in most ways, and there isnt an energy producing immigrant group like that, but I what I’m getting at is that it is probably way worse for europe than the US relative to what you can see in the raw numbers of today, even if we are more redistributive in some ways, and it is probably worse for the US in raw numbers than stated, apart from importing farm workers or something, since everyone eats (leaving aside the ways that it has skewed our ag policies), and having cheaper food is in some ways like having cheaper oil.
I keep reading from very sharp people lots of arguments about how bad it is to have a shrinking and aging population, and while I agree I dont see why we couldnt adapt. (I dont think we will though and importing immigrants makes adaptation *worse* not better). Without technology it would be an unmitigated disaster, but most people have bullshit jobs to some degree that dont produce anything that matters. A relatively small fraction of the population does all the things that keep everything going, and with technology increasing over time that is probably only going to be magnified in aggregate. An exception will hopefully be farming.
Interesting to look into how either Albanians or Chechnyans are the worst immigrants in Europe, rather than whatever you might expect. By a very wide margin. Idk if that’s true measured by rape gang propensity though.
Thanks for an interesting read. This argument seems to rest on certain assumptions.
There are examples of immigration programs that target immigrants with higher human and financial capital. In those cases, the average age decreases, the average education increases and the household savings increase. Plus much of their childhood education was paid by a foreign country.
Concrete examples include the Indian-American community. Many came through IT worker programs and make on average way more than the average American because they are way more productive.
So, do you see that a targetted approach could in fact, in some cases, be highly beneficial?
Unlike low skilled immigrants, highly educated immigrants generally are a fiscal net positive, but every other issue mentioned still remains and in some cases can be magnified. An educated immigrant is much more likely to be able to get in to your elite and actually directly affect public policy, change the culture, etc.
I had a good friend who was a very Americanized and wealthy Indian. I remember him saying that India was positioning itself to be the next world super power. I asked who he would fight for if a war broke out between US and India. After a long and deliberate hesitation, he said, with somw degree of pain but also certainty, "it would have to be India". This is just an anecdotal story but I still found it concerning.
"These characteristics are persistent and differences don’t disappear with cultural assimilation (they are, because like almost all human traits they are substantially genetic)."
You are so right.
"Biosingularity, as the name implies, is the biological analogue to AI singularity. Rather than smarter machines that design smarter machines that design smarter machines, you have smarter humans coming up with more effective ways to increase human intelligence."
This is something dear to my heart. One of those ways is embryo selection, but that has its limits. For me, a better way to benefit the ascendance of humanity is genetic enhancement. And not just an increase in cognitive ability but several positive human traits. Ironically, AI is an excellent tool in the quest for human enhancement.
I can see an argument for permitting AI research in very specific domains (medical research, search and rescue, and possibly space exploration.) Everywhere else it needs to be banned, and the institutes dealing with the relevant hardware should be treating it like a level-4 biohazard.
It would be interesting if we could see the US voting patterns from female suffrage onwards and how it affected the elections given that their votes made prohibition possible.It took a while to get to the first mention of race mixing which is the most destructive IMO.
"Making a state’s population go up for the sake of it is meaningless paper-clip maximizing."
Indeed, it is. As always, quality over quantity.
Except economies of scale absolutely still matters. The reason why America is a superpower while Canada is not is because America has a much bigger population, which leads to more diverse industries, more complete supply chains, and obviously a bigger military.
The per capita GDP difference between US and other western countries can largely be attributed to the dominance of the US dollar, which gives the average American more buying power internationally than the average German or Canadian. And the dominance of the USD is downstream from US being a large and dominant superpower.
The biggest problems with immigration are productivity and assimilation, but both are solvable problems. Productivity can be solved by focusing on high skill immigration. Assimilation can be solved by preferring younger immigrants who have been educated in the US, as well as cutting back on family-based visas so that high skill immigrate workers will be forced to assimilate through intermarriage with natives instead of bringing spouses from their home countries.
No, you ignore what truly matters, countries like Switzerland (8.7 million) and Luxembourg (660,000) have much smaller populations yet boast some of the highest per capita GDPs in the world—$87,963 and $128,823 respectively in 2023, compared to the U.S.’s $81,695 (IMF estimates). While, China and India, with populations exceeding 1.4 billion each, have only recently begun to challenge U.S. dominance, and their per capita GDPs ($13,136 and $2,845) lag far behind. Clearly, population size doesn’t guarantee superpower status or economic prosperity.
Having big military is important, but for Europe that is partially solved by alliances, and tech innovations (modern drone warfare doesn't require as much boots on the ground). And of course, as stated by the author, the point of having a military is protection of nation's wealth, land, it's sovereignty, etc. Allowing mass immigration is giving it all away "without a fight".
And rarely openly discussed but very painful and important issue: as the migrant workers are always hugely disproportionately males (sometimes up to 90%), while the base male to female ration in the host country is always at around 50/50, those "young workers" will create an imbalance. The fact is, native men would never willingly put themselves in the situation where they have less opportunities and higher competition. In the end you will end up with the number of lonely men almost equivalent to the number of immigrant young workers. This of course leads to societal tensions, breeds resentment, possible ethnic conflicts, a rise of xenophobia, extremism etc.
And we already have too many examples (mainly from Western Europe) where large influxes of single male migrants have caused a huge increase in sexual crimes (for obvious reasons, young men have urges).
When we compound everything stated, it seems to me that only a malign actor would advocate for such an immigration policy.
Why do people still use GDP instead of GDP PPP?!
All things being equal population size matters. Nothing is guaranteed of course. Luxembourg and Switzerland as examples are silly. It’s basically a gathering of rich people (who made their fortune elsewhere )and bankers. What’s the economy of these countries? What do they produce?
Great article. I agree with every point being made here, and I also appreciate the sensible comparison of AI-risk with much existentially safer bio-enhancement options.
I very much agree. See my comment below.
The age of mass migration is over. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay there and work to improve their living conditions.
Immigration has never been about anything other than creating a permanent government dependent underclass for the uniparty to exploit for votes and create internal chaos to increase their control.
When being an American is an abstract idea, not an actual people, it gives the government the excuse to treat the citizens as subjects. If all being American means is an abstract set of liberal values, then the government does not have to concern themselves with the well being of the people they govern. Even more sinisterly, their own personal ambitions and interest just happen to align with the abstract values they feel responsible for.
Thanks for the tip Orwell 😆
Amazing read.
The only “economic” way to do mass migration is something similar to UAE system for guest workers, i. e. they come in, they work, they leave without any possibility of a permanent status.
Immigration worshippers in the West don’t actually care about economic arguments, sadly.
Except many immigrants to the UAE are residing there effectively permanently.
They have no political rights, there are no elections, they are not allowed into the security services or military (not allowed to get their hands on the guns).
They can be executed with a summarily process, without eternal appeals from HR lawyers. Big difference.
Thanks for this detailed write up, bookmarked for reference.
Interesting, although I think geographic location has more to do with voting patterns of immigrants than genetics. For example, how many of those Democrat white Catholics and Jews were urban people? I'm guessing all of them.
It seems to me voting tendencies are more impacted by the rural/urban divide than anything else. I live in a rural area, and people of Anglo, Italian, Irish, German descent all vote the same way, whereas our urban cousins vote very differently.
Wow well done
It might solve population decline for certain parties or groups with strikingly low birthrates and political ambitions which stretch decades into the future...
Correct. Immigration doesn’t ‘solve’ Population Decline.
Immigration is a Hail Mary Pass, which juices up Consumption & stabilizes the Median Age & the Labour Pool *for a while* until things Decline again.
But the overall numbers on the Median Age & Dependency ratios are a few percentage points max... Which the author correctly notes in this piece.
The author’s optimism about Japan is ill-founded; quite a few essays have been written on why both Japan & South Korea are tech Dystopias in the classical sense of the word... & not worth living in, given the fact that you overwork yourself to death in said societies for Oligarchs.
“Hoping technological advances bail us out” is Hopium without much substance.
As for raising Birth Rates... that will only work for a while in select contexts & locations, given Biocapacity loss. However, that will only last for a while at most.
But yes... there are no solutions here for Ecological Overshoot & its ensuing Second-Order Effects, such as Population Decline, Energy-Material shortfalls, etc. Overshoot is a Predicament with Terms of Surrender, & not a Problem ‘that can be solved.’
https://thefallofthewest.substack.com/p/problems-have-solutions-while-predicaments
Great article. Some things to also ponder: GDP measures are crap, and even income, tax, and redistribution numbers per capita are not that great, since you cant really measure someones actual real contribution to a society based off of that. To give some extreme exaples, let’s say you imported a bunch of immigrants who were dumb but particularly saintly. They never could earn that much money. Having them would be a net positive for a country even if it were expensive. (It would also probably be a net negative for them to immigrate if the place they came from was better in moral terms and moving corroded what was good about them over time). This example also gives the lie to the argument of the USCCB about wanting so many immigrants and claiming it is wrong for us to turn them away. By Catholic teaching it is better to be poor and good, even if it kills you than richer and turn bad. Immigrating to america makes things religiously worse for catholics who move from catholic countries, particularly in the 2nd and subsequent generations. Idk if that’s always been the case but it certainly is today.
Another example would be if you had a bunch of immigrants that did high value things for not much money. So to give a sort of extreme example lets say you had a bunch of immigrants that made oil extraction cheaper and it also depressed the price of oil, and your oil sector as measured gets less profitable, but also you get it cheaper. As an input it has more value than its price, or else people wouldnt use it, and it goes into everything. Such immigrants in this scenario would be a net positive even if the surface numbers made it look negative.
Both examples I listed are kindof extreme and unrealistic, as the saints would probably be extremely right coded in most ways, and there isnt an energy producing immigrant group like that, but I what I’m getting at is that it is probably way worse for europe than the US relative to what you can see in the raw numbers of today, even if we are more redistributive in some ways, and it is probably worse for the US in raw numbers than stated, apart from importing farm workers or something, since everyone eats (leaving aside the ways that it has skewed our ag policies), and having cheaper food is in some ways like having cheaper oil.
I keep reading from very sharp people lots of arguments about how bad it is to have a shrinking and aging population, and while I agree I dont see why we couldnt adapt. (I dont think we will though and importing immigrants makes adaptation *worse* not better). Without technology it would be an unmitigated disaster, but most people have bullshit jobs to some degree that dont produce anything that matters. A relatively small fraction of the population does all the things that keep everything going, and with technology increasing over time that is probably only going to be magnified in aggregate. An exception will hopefully be farming.
Interesting to look into how either Albanians or Chechnyans are the worst immigrants in Europe, rather than whatever you might expect. By a very wide margin. Idk if that’s true measured by rape gang propensity though.
Totally agree about the simplistic metrics used for drawing conclusions on a group’s contribution to a society and economy.
People should stop using GDP if they want to be take seriously.
Thanks for an interesting read. This argument seems to rest on certain assumptions.
There are examples of immigration programs that target immigrants with higher human and financial capital. In those cases, the average age decreases, the average education increases and the household savings increase. Plus much of their childhood education was paid by a foreign country.
Concrete examples include the Indian-American community. Many came through IT worker programs and make on average way more than the average American because they are way more productive.
So, do you see that a targetted approach could in fact, in some cases, be highly beneficial?
Unlike low skilled immigrants, highly educated immigrants generally are a fiscal net positive, but every other issue mentioned still remains and in some cases can be magnified. An educated immigrant is much more likely to be able to get in to your elite and actually directly affect public policy, change the culture, etc.
Good points, thanks. And that education and training might make them a bit older.
Beat me to it
I had a good friend who was a very Americanized and wealthy Indian. I remember him saying that India was positioning itself to be the next world super power. I asked who he would fight for if a war broke out between US and India. After a long and deliberate hesitation, he said, with somw degree of pain but also certainty, "it would have to be India". This is just an anecdotal story but I still found it concerning.
Then perhaps it's best if the USA and India don't go to war. After all, why should they?
Magnificently meticulous. Bravo!
Super intense and revelatory.
"These characteristics are persistent and differences don’t disappear with cultural assimilation (they are, because like almost all human traits they are substantially genetic)."
You are so right.
"Biosingularity, as the name implies, is the biological analogue to AI singularity. Rather than smarter machines that design smarter machines that design smarter machines, you have smarter humans coming up with more effective ways to increase human intelligence."
This is something dear to my heart. One of those ways is embryo selection, but that has its limits. For me, a better way to benefit the ascendance of humanity is genetic enhancement. And not just an increase in cognitive ability but several positive human traits. Ironically, AI is an excellent tool in the quest for human enhancement.
I can see an argument for permitting AI research in very specific domains (medical research, search and rescue, and possibly space exploration.) Everywhere else it needs to be banned, and the institutes dealing with the relevant hardware should be treating it like a level-4 biohazard.
"I can see an argument for permitting AI research in very specific domains (medical research, search and rescue, and possibly space exploration.)"
AI should be treated for what it is: a tool, not a 'replacement' for humans
It would be interesting if we could see the US voting patterns from female suffrage onwards and how it affected the elections given that their votes made prohibition possible.It took a while to get to the first mention of race mixing which is the most destructive IMO.