Plutocrats

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.

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

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.]

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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._

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.