YouTube is all over the place. You really can get great stuff but are you always a few clicks from blackpill hell: "men suck", "women suck", "famous consumer brands that have lost their way", "it all sucks", ...
YouTube is all over the place. You really can get great stuff but are you always a few clicks from blackpill hell: "men suck", "women suck", "famous consumer brands that have lost their way", "it all sucks", ...
"They should follow the rules, like I did"
Never mind the rules were a hell of a lot easier to follow back then. I've seen the paperwork, it wasn't much; if you were from an acceptable country, it was pretty close to show up, get a job and be stable for a year or so, then you can naturalize. Nearly impossible if you came from the wrong country though.
Even 'chain migration' for most relationships takes a lot longer than that, and you have to wait for your visa priority date to come up. If you're from an impacted country, some of the waits are quite long. If you don't have qualified family, and you don't have qualified employment, there's a very small visa allocation for lucky people.
Following those acts and laws, immigration declined to a valley of 4.7% foreign born in 1970. Then it began rising again with more permissive/enabling acts playing a significant role in driving such, like IRCA under Reagan. In any case we're now up to 15.8% with no end in sight, and history is, as always, not just repeating, but practically plagiarizing itself.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...
Every time in US history that there's been an influx of immigrants, there were people spouting essentially identical arguments to the ones they're spouting now (stealing jobs, lack of assimilation, etc.), and every time it's turned out to be basically a non-issue in the long run. I've long had the opinion that most of the people vehemently "against illegal immigration" would probably have basically the same opinion if the numbers were identical but everyone followed the processes they claimed to support, and seeing how the current administration is trying to deport refugees of color while expanding the programs for only white South Africans feels like a pretty transparent confirmation of that.
So in modern times the situation is quite a bit more different and relatively unprecedented, at least if we continue along with anything like the former status quo. But I'd wager that the former status quo is probably dead, even after the current administration leaves office. The DNC is showing good predict market rates for a win in 2028 and I'd wager that they'll run on a much more moderate platform for immigration, far away from both Trump and Biden.
Right before the baby boomers are fully retired is a heckuva time America decided it wants to contract its population by prioritizing keeping the working adult out.
A generation is proportional to the the practical fertility window of a given era, so somewhere around 20 years. The deaths (and subsequent population change) will lag behind generations by about 50 years, but become largely unavoidable because female fertility collapses rapidly after ~40. And so when there is a shared fertility rate amongst a population, each ~20 years the population will change by the fertility factor.
So you end up bleeding people fast once the death phase kicks in - you're talking about losing 50% of your population each 20 years. This is why places like Japan will still look to today as the 'good ole days'. They're currently only losing about 11% of their population per 20 years, but with a fertility rate of 1.2 they'll trend towards losing around 40% per 20 years.
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Anyhow, the point of this all is that there simply are not enough people in the world to make up for this sort of loss. And that's if you're willing to accept an adult male with no education and who may not even speak the language, which isn't exactly the foundation of a great society. When you speak of wanting skilled English speakers, both male and female, then yeah - it's really not happening.
So countries will be left to increase their fertility rates or die. Though even that statement kind of misrepresents what happens. Rather the higher fertility subpopulations within society will gradually come to dominate those societies. So in some manner speaking, perhaps the Bible was write and the meek will come to inherit the Earth. An America made of Amish? Pretty funny to imagine, but not really out of domain of possibility at all. Fertility is going to radically reshape the face of Earth and it's difficult to predict what that will look like other than very different.
Which made it even funnier when I discovered that they never actually legally naturalized.
Many such cases.
On the other hand the "follow the rules" thing is pretty strong and you cannot fight it and win.
I got pretty mad riding the subway in NYC paying the toll and seeing turnstile jumpers hold the emergency door open to let people in.
There are all these rules you have to follow big and small that you don't agree with that you either follow resentfully or you disobey while taking some real or imagined risk.
To take one stupid example I've been through multiple toilets in one bathroom and haven't found one that flushes reliably. It's easy to blame the regulation in New York State that a toilet has a maximum flush volume and you'd better believe I am thinking about going down to PA to get a toilet and see if I have better luck. We all have these things that we could be resentful about and one thing that keeps it in check is knowing that other people are subject to this too: when we see people who seem to be "cutting the line" it makes our blood boil.
Now you can say it is not what people think, like really the chicken houses that hire 600 illegal immigrants wouldn't want to hire legal workers because then they'd have some protections, and that's all true. But the iron law of political psychology applies and if you want to change attitudes it would be a big help to move immigrant workers out of the shadows or to cut back on rules that make people resentful with little benefit.
To quote Mon Mothma in Andor:
I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest. This Chamber’s hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza. What took place yesterday… what happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide! Yes! Genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this chamber! And the monster screaming the loudest? The monster we’ve helped create? The monster who will come for us all soon enough is Emperor Palpatine!
Edit: Apologies, I think I mean his documentary: Can't Get You Out of My Head. Essentially it asserts that all revolutions fail, because the people who attempt to overthrow simply become the new guard.
> People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
Additional context: The city is being (mis-)ruled by a paranoid dictator, whose brutal secret police don't care too much about if you're innocent. The cynical protagonist is frustrated that some of the resistance is also extremist or at least overly-optimistic about what's going to happen next.
"Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes."
Where is the contradiction here?
The other is nativist propaganda: "Hordes of scary 'aliens' are coming to take your jobs and destroy your way of life, bringing their drugs and crime and turning your neighborhood into a trash heap. They might even eat your pets!"
People have difficulty noticing that the second story is supposed to be a description of what they or their ancestors personally lived as the first story; people compartmentalize and sometimes believe the propaganda version even though it directly contradicts their lived experience.
In Binghamton there are Turkish immigrants who run Middle Eastern restaurants which our extended family love to go which are so much like the Italian restaurants that Italians still run and I'll see a teenager hanging out there who seems so much like an Italian teenager.
A person seeing that similarity could (and should) have a sense of "these people are going to come here and contribute and pay taxes and grow the economy to help support me" which is what the outcome is most of the time.