Plutocrats

Posted by Spandrell on

A long standing debate inside the reactosphere is the question about what is driving the push for mass immigration into developed countries. Why would anyone argue for bringing millions of, to use PC speak, low-skilled migrants from Third World countries? Yes they are cheap, but it's well established than in the long run they cost more in externalities than whatever you could save with their cheap labor. Not to speak of criminality, dragging down of school performance and just general tackiness.

The most general, I'd say intuitive theory about why the establishment wants to bring all the poor of the world into rich countries is that they are cheap fucks who want cheap labor to exploit, and use as servants in order to feel classy and superior à la Downton Abbey. Let's call that the Sailer theory, after Steve Sailer's stellar takedown on Mark Zuckerberg's pro-immigration lobby.

I am pretty comfortable following my instincts and blaming the plutocrats for trying to transform rich countries into Brazil in order to enjoy the feudal lord lifestyle. But everytime I'd do so, the whip of neoreaction Vladimir would come by and strongly argue against it. See an example:

The idea of “cheap labor” as a major motivator for the political activity of businessmen is, while not completely irrelevant in practice, still blown way out of proportion. Businesses in the modern managerial, semi-communized state have an infinite array of options for rent-seeking, and it’s naive to suppose that they’d expend the bulk of their influence on this one major ideological battle — rather than concentrating on much more petty and obscure, and yet far more easy and profitable venues for milking government cash, restricting competition, regulatory arbitrage, etc.Think about it: as we speak, there are exorbitant sums of government cash being helicoptered to well-connected businesses under all kinds of pretenses, lavish profits made by (de jure or de facto) state-chartered monopolies, and whole classes of businesses given such brazen privilege for shearing the public that they can be seen as de facto tax farmers. Now, in this situation, imagine a businessman figuring out how to boost his profits by playing politics — and instead of grabbing as much as he can of this readily available stream of rent-seeking cash, he instead gets the brilliant idea to spend money and time fighting the most radical ideological battle imaginable and struggling to turn the entire society upside-down, all this in hope that his payroll costs might fall by a few percent at some distant point in the future!There are indeed some special situations where it makes sense for particular groups of businessmen to lobby for cheap foreign labor, where the process is straightforward, quick, and directly related to their industry — e.g. the Silicon Valley lobbying for more temporary visa programmers, or farmers lobbying for more foreign fruit-pickers. But it’s completely naive to extrapolate this into some vast and general plutocratic open borders conspiracy, or to believe that this is a major part of the forces behind the current Cathedral consensus. Real big business players have far better ways to profit from politics, and spend the their time and money on those.

I do marketing for Sahib

Funny thing is Japan has special provision for foreign greedy fucks to get their goddamn nannies and shut up about it. But of course the plutocrats today are hiring native Japanese and trying to assimilate them to their own, like this English-language boarding school with token negros included. And obviously an essential part of successful acculturation into the Davos culture is having a full time 80 IQ nanny to do your childcare and marketing. So Japan must allow everyone with more than 70,000 dollars of annual income (around 6% of households) to hire one. Otherwise the Japanese economy will never have growth nor be vibrant and dynamic and enterpreneurial and holy and godly and honey spice and everything nice.

It seems to me that the new Davos elite is pushing for immigration just to enjoy the superior  lifestyle of a Sahib, hidden in their guarded compounds free to enjoy in conspicuous consumption. Then of course the junior elite who can't afford filipina nannies to do their marketing have to do their own marketing, and claim status by being holier-than-thou. You know what goes next.

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  • Open your ports or we'll open them for you!!!

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    • It’s Bootleggers and Baptists. Vladimir is correct that the benefits to most business from mass immigration are not large enough to expend political capital on. The difference from other campaigns, though, is that this one does not actually cost the businesses politically, because it is a left-wing cause. If a business pushes for weaker environmental protection, as an example, it will be punished for it by the media. In some special cases it might be worth it for a business to take that punishment, but most will steer well clear. On this point, however, they can push their interests and be rewarded by the media. [Aside, I assume you do understand that “marketing” in the above article means “going to a market to buy food”, not branding & advertising.]

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      • You assume wrongly, I had no idea. And what the hell is wrong with these people, Tokyo has supermarkets open 24 hours a day. And nobody eats at home anyway. The cause for allowing people to hire foreign servants is the uber non-leftist cause in Japan. It's anathema. And this isn't a public campaign, it's a purely private, smoking door request of the American elite to the Japanese government. These people really want cheap 80 IQ nannies.

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        • This sort of news gives me the willies. It is slightly encouraging that the cause has made no visible progress in a year, but the fact that a former chief of Tokyo Immigration holds pro-immigration views is chilling. OTOH he's a former chief and the MOJ official quoted sounds skeptical... Brr. It's a pity that that Hashimoto guy turned out to be a windbag, and that Ishihara geezer... pfui. As for supermarkets, an elite American person isn't going to have her children fed supermarket stuff. It's got to be organic, ethical, locally sourced etc. By the way, do you know where does the Japanese civil service get its opinions from? What do they read every day?

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          • I got the creeps too. Still not being in Tokyo has its advantages. The immigration bureau wants jobs for the boys, so of course they want more to do. I've no idea how the civil service decision making works. Ministries are allegedly quite independent and mostly hate each other. I guess they read the Yomiuri, and the neolibs read the Nikkei. Check your email btw.

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            • And btw rich Tokyoites shop at Daimaru Peacock, which sells good stuff and closes at 10. Certainly nothing locally sourced! After Fukushima Kanto produce doesn't sell too well.

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        • This shows the error (I think this was discussed here recently) of trying to explain capitalism in purely economic terms. A very important thing for businessmen is to have a very high level of power over their employees. It's not enough for them to simply have a pool of competent workers available at not-excessive wages, they feel they must have an essentially unlimited pool of highly competent but also highly compliant and submissive workers available at whatever wage they feel is correct. A deep need for not exactly absolute power, but about as much power you can have over another human being without being able to inflict violence on him, is a deep psychological need of the capitalist.

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          • People wanting to have unlimited power over their surroundings shouldn't be exclusive to capitalism. Kim the Fat is going to execute thousands of people to show others who's boss. An unrelenting drive towards power/status is human nature. Of course capitalism brings its own set of dynamics, which cause rich people to push for Brazilification so they can feel superior every day of the week, at work and at home. My pint is that blaming everything in leftist theology is misguided. The Soviets were leftist but didn't import poverty. But to the extent that the West is capitalist, the Left must accommodate some of the wishes of the capitalist class. And of course rationalize it as coming from the purest leftist first principles.

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          • You can't just look at price alone, which is what is wrong with Vladimir's comment. I am good friends with a lot of small business owners. A lot of ex-military folks who don't stay in government will go into these labor-intensive small businesses because they have good experience managing average people and that's what they're good at and they enjoy the authority and independence. I personally know five employers who hire lots of immigrants (mostly Mexicans, mostly legal, but not always). All of them are stereotypical patriotic Americans, and they are deeply conflicted about what they are doing, but, 'business is business.' None of them are Democrats, but every single one of them gives money to Democrats so they can lobby for more visas. It's astonishing and depressing. The business sectors are 1. factory-ish agricultural 2. the hotel industry, 3. A maid / house-cleaning service, 4. A nanny / daycare service, and 5. A pet kenneling operation. All of them pay above minimum wage, taxes, and some benefits. They could easily and effortlessly get unemployed Americans at much less than what they pay now, and they are in competition with other businesses so the temptation to lower costs in this way is always intense. There are also all kinds of local government incentive programs if they will hire these people. Like I said, their businesses are low-skill labor-intensive, and wages constitute one of their major costs, if not their top expense. If they take advantage of all those programs, and the lower wages, they would be spending much less and have much more competitive prices. Some have tried it, and all have said it wasn't worth it. The Americans in 'competition' for these jobs are mainly blacks but also a lot of prole Whites and some native-born descendants of Latin American immigrants, and the business owners from many different areas of the country all complain that they are horrible, awful, terrible workers who would have negative marginal productivity even at zero wages. They don't show up on time, they are surly and have bad attitudes, insubordinate, no work ethic, shiftless, lazy, scheming, no flexibility if you need someone to main an extra shift, they steal merchandise the second they're not watched, they text or talk on their phones all the time, they are awful with customers in attitude, appearance, and diction, they are always on drugs, they are always having 'family issues' or 'personal problems' or 'medical appointments'. They can't take any correction or criticism because of their inflated egos and need for constant validation and self-esteem boosts. The turnover is tremendous because they'll frequently quit without notice or commit a firing offense in the first few weeks or months of hiring them. Etc., etc., and believe me I could go on for another thousand words with what they've told me. Like I said, none of them like what they are doing, but they feel compelled to do it if they are to stay in business, and they have compiled lengthy rationalizations and collected countless anecdotal stories to justify their decisions. They all mention their fear of lawsuits, either racism, sexist, disability, or workers' compensation, which Americans will do on the drop of a hat at any perceived grievance or slight, or even without any at all. The point is, current American culture and the welfare state simply ruins native-born proles as potential employees. It ruins them as people. They're not competitive. Nobody wants to hire them at any price. The Mexican and Filipino peasants, on the other hand, are not just cheap - they are excellent serfs - they grateful for their jobs, loyal, diligent, obedient, hard-working, always trying to make a good impression, always willing to go the extra mile if you need them. They'll be a good worker for life, there are an infinite number of them just begging to come across the border, and they never complain. Getting a person like that, who is also _cheap, is a _huge_ benefit. That's the classic rent-seeking - concentrated benefits, dispersed costs. Private, short-term benefits for me and my friends now, public, long-term social costs for everybody else in the future. And this experience, over time, also ruins the mindset and politics of the employer class and it becomes incorporated into the working ideology of the plutocrat class. They stop thinking about how these workers aren't smart, and how their dim kids grow up to be just as awful, entitled, and unfit for work as the unemployed Americans they won't hire. They'll say it's not their problem; they weren't the ones who ruined those people, and they're powerless to do anything about the forces that did. I'm not angry at the employer class, and not even so much at the Plutocrats (though I certainly hope they fail with regard to their immigration advocacy, especially in Japan's case). Yes, not hiring locals and wage-suppression from immigration in an input into the system, but the problem is mostly cultural. And I am dismayed at the culture which mocks Horatio Alger storeis and takes plenty of human capital, which could be put to some use and live some semblance of a bourgeois life with proper training and socialization (and probably religion), but instead churns out nothing but this awful underclass._

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            • Filipino peasants, on the other hand, are not just cheap – they are excellent serfs – they grateful for their jobs, loyal, diligent, obedient, hard-working, always trying to make a good impression, always willing to go the extra mile if you need them.

              Nah, a good chunk of domestic helper and nurse Filipinas who somehow got into Japan ended up escaping from their visa sponsors and going into prostitution. Same with the Vietnamese who are running petty crime rackets all over the place. Japanese domestic helpers are orders of magnitude more obedient, diligent and professional than the best serfs that Southeast Asia can produce. But they're expensive, and don't take shit. I get the American angle, but it doesn't apply here.

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              • I agree it doesn't apply to Japan. But I understand why American officials think it does. As an aside, the split in conscientiousness between Filipinos and Filipinas is massive. It begs from some explanation from someone who knows more about it. Their guys are pretty good, but their women are the shadiest flakes and most shameless cheats in existence. The worst GI-wife you can get is a Filipina, guaranteed to cuckold and divorce a guy.

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                • I've no idea. Chinese admixture? Or lack thereof. The guys are being brought recently as agricultural serfs. I read Farmers say Filipinos are the laziest and first to escape. Mostly to help Filipinas prostitute themselves. Losing Taiwan was a bummer, but I think even the hardest Japanese militarists are glad that McArthur went back to the Philippines.

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                  • Maybe the trick is to separate the Filipinos from the corrupting influence of the Filipinas. The Gulf Arabs do this with the Muslim Filipinos, and so does the hotel/casino industry in Nevada (mostly Las Vegas, but other places too), where the female jobs are done by Latin Americans, not Filipinas. The cruise and shipping industry is full of Filipinos, but far away from Filipinas. It's all a bit strange. I bet you there are plenty of people who know these facts intimately, but aren't exactly keen to share them.

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              • I come from the working class. Both my father, mother, grandfather, and grandmother were all blue collar union workers. Neither they nor most of his co-workers I knew where "underclass". My Dad worked way harder then most white collar workers I know and he had much better cultural and personal attitudes. These people's primary problem isn't their attitudes (which seem fine), but the fact that their jobs and wages have been eviscerated. Work twice as much for half as much is the story of the last few decades. How long until that starts eating away at men? How long do you expect people to keep a good attitude when things get worse every year no matter what they do? I have no clue what things are like for the 80 IQ underclass, but illegal immigration is shredding the 100 IQ average white blue collar worker. If my Dad's job paid what it paid in the age of strong unions there is no fucking way I'd be a toadying white collar sell out. I'd have a real job.

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                • I'm with you man. All sides of my family come from the same class of occupation until my generation. My father was a blue-collar union man, and my father-in-law never grey up on a farm and never went to college. Then all tended to get their start in very low-paying jobs, but ended up being able to afford a decent lifestyle for their families. Then again, they were smart, hard-working, disciplined, religious and genuinely dedicated to a certain vision of what it means to pursue a decent life. And they also lived in communities that were both affordable and high quality. And then the trend discontinuity you see over and over again in Murray's 'Coming Apart' shows up in the 60's. Here's what's important - it shows up at the peak of real-purchasing-power minimum wages, the peak of unionization, and before immigration reform (so at the peak of native-born percentage). Not one of my employer friends sees any American applicant who reminds them of themselves, or of a representative member of our or our parents' generations. They see human trash. That's the problem with Unz's minimum wage proposal. You need to do that in parallel with a cultural renaissance, but that isn't on order. Yes, of course, wages and labor supply have a lot to do with what undermined the culture. But I maintain, the problem is the culture that produces this trash. If you could fix the trash-culture problem, and subsidized labor of a restored-ethic working class, then employers wouldn't need immigrants and wouldn't ask for them.

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                  • How much culture can you have when your basically a slave? No self respecting person is going to work for min wage at these levels unless the alternative is starvation. They would rather drop out. If you want people to act like respectable middle class people you need to pay them respectable middle class wages. Importing desperate serfs that become underclass after a generation isn't sustainable. I take your view differently. We were at the height in the 1960s, and Coming Apart was the decades long slide that resulted from progressivism. Each year the conditions these people lived in got worse, and so each year they got worse. If we went back to the conditions that existed in 1960 I think behavior would improve.

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                    • Maybe, but I still think the economic and the cultural complement each other and you have shoot both barrels. That is, no economic policy reform by itself is sufficient to cause a cultural restoration. There are two problems with it. First, the immigrant serfs are 'basically slaves' as you describe, and yet maintain the employer-desirable set of values and attitudes. The economics are the same for them and their kids, but their dispositions are entirely different. They are mostly American legal residents and could get all that sweet welfare, but they remain strivers nonetheless. That's cultural, not economic; it's something they pick up as poor kids and it doesn't wear off during their life. They just don't know how to transmit it to their kids in the American social and cultural context. There is a whole history of very poor people, Americans and immigrants alike, working for much less in real terms than what is on offer to Americans today, and who had the right bourgeois attitudes despite living and working conditions we would consider 'slave-like' today. I would strongly recommend 'The American Millstone', a book of articles by the Chicago Tribune, to emphasize the detrimental transformation in attitudes towards work that occurred in the Black ghetto underclass community over fifty years ago. The blacks are the just canary in the coalmine for all the other groups, the great unheeded warning.

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                      • Of course the behavior of your business owner friends makes economic sense, as well as the attitude of the natives who refuse to accept downward mobility. There's a vicious cycle going on where no side is to blame. That's why it's a matter for public policy. I'm sure a lot of business owners were harmed by the 1925 immigration cutoff. But the government did it anyway, fucked who they had to fuck, and waited for the results. And results came. Send the serfs back home and with time the natives will find a way to be productive.

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                        • In the short term, I tend to sympathize more with the petite-bourgeoisie class to which my friends belong. In the long term, I agree it's a vicious cycle and they're part of a phenomenon which is killing the country. I agree with some of what you say, though I'm not sure it would actually work that way, but I'm willing to take the risk and run the experiment. I'd say, 'At least it can't make anything worse', but that's not completely true. In the short term, it is the petite-bourgeoisie, already highly pressured, which will suffer, to the benefit of the giant franchise corporations. Social policy should encourage a large class of entrepreneurs and small business owners, and so the efficient policy would somehow be to compensate or subsidize these guys in the short term while their Joe's learn what it means to work a steady 9-to-5. But also, I suspect things are just too different from 1925. Folks back then grew up no richer than Mexican peasants. They didn't have access to a womb-to-tomb welfare state, and didn't grow up around people who have been dependent on Uncle Sugar for generations. Without the 'strive or starve, diligence or death' severe consequence, kids will never get the moral training they need from real world consequences. They grew up in a Horatio Alger culture, and I think there is such a thing as Cultural Entropy. It's much harder and takes longer to build a culture that promotes ethics of hard work and trustworthiness than it is to destroy it. We've been living off the remnants of the Long March of Christianity for generations, but the underclass has been running on an empty tank for a generation or two now, with the thin slice above them running on fumes and falling into their morass. Also, the 1925 kids weren't raised in public schools and in a broader culture than undermined all this. Finally, while there was a boom in innovation and mechanized productivity back then, there was nothing like the outright techno-automation revolution like is happening now. Employers don't have to have much patience to get performance out of their ruined human trash, they'll just buy robots.

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                          • In 1925 the trajectory was up, no matter the absolute level. In addition we were all "in the same boat". In 2013 the trajectory is down, no matter the absolute level. And everyone knows the people at the top don't consider you a person. It seems to me the bootstrap culture relies on the idea that there is some feedback to bootstrapping. You work harder, your live improves. Whatever you station in life, you know your kids will do better. There is no feedback mechanism today. If you are a hard working blue collar worker in America things are going to get shittier every year, and things will be even shittier for your kids. I try to imagine how I would act if I had a working class IQ, working class incentive structures, working class cultural norms. I just don't see how I'd turn out any different then these people, so I can't really blame them. When my Dad's union got busted and they took a 40% paycut and lost medical how do you go home an explain to your kids that he was anything but a sucker to work those long hard days. http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2116

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                          • I agree, people today aren't psychologically primed for productive labor. But that's plastic to some extent. I think it's worth giving it a shot rather than going on with Brazilification. We know all too well what that leads to.

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                            • "Rebourgeoisification" is a mouthful but a decent name for the neoreactionary consensus social reform project. It seems Conservative, but you can't conserve something that's already gone, and you can't do it with a hands-off Libertarian approach. There, "Why I am not a Conservative or Libertarian" in two sentences.

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                              • "“Rebourgeoisification” is a mouthful but a decent name for the neoreactionary consensus social reform project. " That I can quite get behind. It's nonsense BTW that we can't bring back manufacturing, it's already happening despite USG's best efforts.

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                                • The richest inheritance today is having parents who marry, stay together and do the right things. Not income, not genes. It's not a matter of money or what work a man does, not that I'm not willing to go all the way to closed economy to bring back the good jobs, even if they're not the identical jobs. The destruction of our industrial base is not a generation old, and it's regenerating despite USG INCs best efforts.

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                                • Third world countries are so dirt poor that even when people get out of them they live in fear of being poor the rest of their lives. That desperation leave a psychological imprint that probably inoculates them against welfare, but unless they have their kids live through childhoods of poverty its not going to transfer.

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                                  • It's a very economic reductionism / Marxist-materialist way of looking at things. Can't culture, education, and religion all leave lifelong 'psychological imprints' too, or is it just the economic conditions of childhood? Plenty of Americans grow up in poverty today, though maybe not 'dirt poor' poverty, depending on where you set that special level, but remain culturally ruined. Still, I know plenty of people who grew up probably equally poor materially, but richer culturally, than today's unemployabled, and they went to work for peanuts, and they followed the bourgois prescription for prosperity and ended up, in not 'wealthy', then ok. Look, the crappy attitudes and behaviors that make lots of Americans unsuitable and/or uncompetitive for low-skill or entry-level work have many inputs. There is a real moral failure and a real cultural failure to instill, support, and reinforce bourgeois virtues. It's not correct to remove all human autonomy and excuse all their attitudes and behaviors away as a pure result of economic factors. That's the progressive's game. "It's not culture, it's not genes, it's not the collapse of religion, it's not poor choices and impulsive decision making, it's all just 'poverty' and 'oppression'" I don't buy that.

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                                    • I think there is a big difference between "dirt poor" and "America poor". One has really harsh feedback mechanisms and one doesn't. My point is that these immigrants aren't immune to trash culture via being from their host cultures (hence why they become underclass in a generation). They are immune because they have experienced dirt poor poverty. Look, if your poor and don't have good natural talents what do you have to look forward to in this country. Working your butt off for a job that barely pays better then welfare? Being treated like shit at work? Watching your kids do worse then you did? Again, its hard to look at what happened to my Dad's co-workers and not see this as a rigged and hopeless game. Those guys wake up at 3am and work 10-12 hour days of hard labor. You don't get more bootstrap then that. What did it get them? A 50% overnight reduction in living standards. Quite frankly, for what a man earns at the job now I don't see how he can reliably expect to attract and keep a wife. So no family. What is he working for? Maybe people were poorer in 1900, but they expected to be richer the next day, the next year, the next decade. There was some actual feedback between their actions and their outcomes. Real things to work for. What is there today?

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                          • So to continue what is needed is apparently a system of government staffed by fleets of people who mean harm and to profit from it that runs tolerably well. Or perhaps another solution is called for...

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                            • Hiring illegals is illegal, and this is to some considerable extent actually enforced, while laws against minor burglary are not enforced. Giving them welfare is mandatory, and California they get welfare preference over whites, and even over blacks. Obviously, the overclass does not want to import workers, but layabouts who live on welfare on crime.

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                              • @Handle "There is a whole history of very poor people, Americans and immigrants alike, working for much less in real terms than what is on offer to Americans today" Material compensation is not the only factor that should be used when evaluating the desirability of a social role. The effects of the role on social status are extremely important as well. Some occupations raise your social status, some lower it and some are in between, In the past, some occupations lowered your social status so much that you became an outcast group, ostracized from society and forced to live in segregated communities. Like the Burakumin, a group of Japanese untouchable types that were considered impure because they performed occupations that were associated with death. But even those outcast groups were better off than people who work at Walmart in one very significant way. Their women were outcast with them. And their women kept the artificially low status that women typically have in non-progressive societies. So, they could marry Burakumin women who were wife material (by the standards of the day) and have families with them, even though they were low status outcast undertakers. And they did have families; problems sometimes arose with members of these castes out-reproducing the mainstream society. But in today's society, the status of women is artificially elevated, not reduced. If there are any wife-material women working at Walmart, the men who work at Walmart can't marry them. Female status has been raised across the board and men are happy to marry downwards, so the men of each class marry a bit downwards to compensate. Thus, the females with the highest opinions of their own status (graduate degrees) and the males with the lowest actual status (men working at Walmart) are left without mates. So when you're asking someone to work at Walmart, you're not asking them to become the equivalent of an untouchable or even an unfree agricultural laborer. You're asking them to become the equivalent of one of those castrated slaves that the Arabs kept. Since this castration is temporary, you're not going to keep many employees who haven't given up. And welfare is just more fun for those who have given up. Even crime stacks up somewhat favorably. Social status is a social construct and immigrants aren't Americans, so the situation plays out a little differently for them. Immigrating to America from the third world and landing a paying job is a big boost to their social status, if we're talking about a community of third world immigrants raised in third world poverty. Thus, they can attract a wife-material wife from their immigrant community, thus the job is worth doing for them, but not for their American children. Sorry for contributing to the America related derail. Anyway, this also explains why elites want foreigners to serve them. For the reasons described above, "servant" is now a job for losers. Hanging out with losers lowers your social status, even when they're your employees. Third world foreigners operate on a foreign status hierarchy, where first world servant is a decent job, not a job for losers. So when you hire a foreigner to do your marketing, not only do you get diversity points, but you avoid hanging out with losers. That Filipina nanny is upwardly mobile.

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                                • This is an absolutely brilliant insight. Social status matters more than money, more than prison, more than the risk of violent death, because without it you are not going to get your little man wet, you are not going to have a wife, you are not going to have children.

                                  Female status has been raised across the board and men are happy to marry downwards, so the men of each class marry a bit downwards to compensate. Thus, the females with the highest opinions of their own status (graduate degrees) and the males with the lowest actual status (men working at Walmart) are left without mates.
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                              • I think Handle and Smersh explained your hunch well, Spandrell. I conclude that a society that is healthy enough to handle immigration is one that doesn't need immigrants. Using immigration to salve these pains is like treating your cancer with tylenol. The cancer's getting worse anyway and now you're also doing in your liver. The solution is to quit the painkillers and try an actual therapy. We could either cut off immigration or do that weird and crazy personal responsibility thing, where the person responsible for the visa is held liable for the consequences of the immigrant and their family. With either in place you get market forces on your side, so it will seem like the cancer treats itself. Eventually.

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                                • A smaller point - the Chamber of Commerce lobbies for more immigration even though it wouldn't benefit most of its members much, because it will immensely benefit some of its members. It's the same distributed costs/concentrated benefits problem at the lobby-group level. (And, in the American situation, it buys them some positive press.) What I really don't get is why labor unions support more immigration - there's almost no benefit to either existing members or union leaderships.

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                                  • Unions is largely: 1) Public unions, so all sorts of government context there 2) Old private unions where the guys close to retirement are hoping to cash out before the union inevitably gets crushed. In addition, union leadership is often no longer from the working class. It's increasingly the same overeducated shitlibs trying to crush prole whites. Finally, there used to be a lot of unofficial union leadership from people who were a bit to smart for their jobs but ended up in them anyway before sorting mechanisms like the current university admission system were firmly in place. For instance, my father was a sharp college graduate that they tried to get to cross the picket line during a strike to become a manager, but he turned them down. He wasn't an official union boss, but he certainly had sway. Many of these people simply became white collar employees in the next generation, and there are fewer stand outs in the blue collar labor force.

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                                  • I certainly agree with the idea that the elites will push for policies that are favourable to themselves without regard to costs or externalities. When I was in high school in the 1970's one of the popular crusades was to loosen immigration controls on West Indies immigrants. The elite, you see, were so sorry that their Jamaican maids were separated from their families for years at time. They wanted to help those poor women bring their children into Canada. Now half of Toronto's crime is caused by those poor kids, and their kids. Also at the time, the Great Lakes had somewhat higher water levels. Since most of the shoreline around Georgian bay and Lake Superior were owned by the wealthy, they campaigned for a dike to be built along the whole shoreline. Ontario at the time was run by Conservative Bill Davis, and he shot down the idea, but it was still a news story for a few weeks. I suspect with the present day Ontario Liberals it would have passed; they recently cost the province a billion just to move planned gas generating plants from two iffy ridings before the last election.

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                                    • This is not really evidence for the plutocrat argument. This is evidence of horizontal transmission promoting virulence. The American Chamber of Commerce in Japan represents the interests of American professional and business expats in Japan. Suffice to say that these American expats are less genetically related to the Japanese nation and thus share less genetic interest with the Japanese nation. They identify less with the Japanese nation and human ecology, where they are recent inhabitants and generally transitory ones. As a result they have greater incentive to exploit the human ecology and environment. This is classic horizontal transmission promoting the evolution of virulence.

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                                      • Lawrence Auster outlined some of the more cliched arguments used by open borders advocates. I think you're right about the plutocrats pushing the economic/wage arguments. Auster also notes the emotional/moralistic arguments. http://jtl.org/auster/Huddled/Huddled.html#ch4 As Peter Frost notes, North West Europeans are particularly susceptible because of their guilt culture - the origins of which go back a long way. http://evoandproud.blogspot.co.nz/2013/12/the-origins-of-northwest-european-guilt.html

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                                        • I don't see how one can mention immigration without acknowledging all the major money and interest behind are Jewish.

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                                        • As a follow up, Jews are not behind immigration because they are elites benefiting from low wages. They are behind it because a White Christian society that outgroups people will outgroup them, so it is in their benefit to make their host countries as multicultural as possible, and demonize those who outgroup people as "racist".

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                                          • "The idea of “cheap labor” as a major motivator for the political activity of businessmen is, while not completely irrelevant in practice, still blown way out of proportion. Businesses in the modern managerial, semi-communized state have an infinite array of options for rent-seeking" The two aren't inconsistent. If you assume politics currently follows donations then it only takes those specific businessmen who do benefit from cheaper labor to be dispropotionate in their donations i.e. it might be only 10% of businesses but those businesses provide 50% of donations or even simpler that the policy is decided by the balance of donations i.e. open borders gets x million dollars versus zero* dollars for closed borders. *Actually the monetary value of remaining in office. Generally the cheap labor lobby will be that part of the plutocrats whose business cannot be offshored for cheap labor i.e. service jobs like retail, restaurants, fast-food etc. Other plutocrats will be bribing politicians to give them other rent-seeking opportunities.

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