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Graham Cunningham's avatar

My guess is that your thesis is more accurate than Smith's. But I am going to go off at a bit of a tangent on the subject of emigration/immigration:

The only sane immigration policy for an rich society to adopt would have been to filter/select for the immigrants who could convincingly show a very positive identification with the values of the host society. (Immigration to19th/early 20thc. America was approximately that way....or am I romanticising?) They would not necessarily have had to be intellectually top notch....just keen to contribute. You could even make a case that the emigrant culture would benefit from off-loading some of its more culturally alienated citizens (although not a strong case I suspect).

I have said "would have been" deliberately because - in the US and much of Europe - that horse has long ago bolted in the wake of 'multiculturalism'. (For instance, any documentation produced by the UK National Health Service these days will convey some useless bit of information followed by several pages of translations of said information into upwards of 30 different languages because God forbid that they should feel the need to learn the language of their new home) Rant over. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/

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Jim Hyde's avatar

Indian IT workers have not done anything for the US except lower wages for American IT workers who are eventually replaced by Indians. Filipino nurses have not benefited the US, it's just lowered wages and created Filipino enclaves all over the US further adding to the ethnic confusion that is the US today. These workers and now residents, send billions of dollars home in remittances that might benefit India and the Philippines, but is money lost permanently to the US. The importation of "skilled" workers who are too genetically different from the European majority in the US has been an unmitigated disaster.

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