This is no new phenomenon, but its effects have become more and more obvious and pronounced over the past decade, especially with the massive overrepresentation of Indians in engineering, science, and health. Indian American children actually scored better than any other group on "digit span" tests given to young immigrants, indicating an average IQ of about 112 (79th percentile). For an older article on the same subject, see: http://newamericamedia.org/2012/07/indian-americans-most-edu...
What is the cause? Most likely, an extremely strong self-selecting tendency for immigrants. Most of the Indian immigrants I know attended one of the IITs, and I'm sure many here have a similar experience. The flipside of this self-selection is a pronounced brain drain on Indian society. It will be very interesting over the next two decades to see if, with the rise of India, this trend continues, flattens, or even reverses. Even with the current level of investment, however, the new "model minority" is likely to stay that way for a while.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
The way people quote it, you'd think it was straight out of the Constitution or Declaration of Independence or something. The fact that the poem was written after the Chinese Exclusion Act was written makes it something of a farce, IMHO.
The words stand on their own, but the broad application of those words is certainly an ideal, and not a true reflection of this country's varied immigration policies towards various ethnic groups over its shortish history.
> It will be very interesting over the next two decades to see if, with the rise of India, this trend continues, flattens, or even reverses.
This is true. I graduated from one of the well-known engineering colleges 4 years back in India and a good percentage of my CS batch went to study in top-schools in the US with a primary motivation to get a job and get settled.
Fast forward to now, most of them are looking at coming back and thinking of getting a slice of pie in the booming tech / Ecommerce market in the country. With VC investments booming, and mobile penetration rising tremendously (even in tier 2 cities / towns) the order of the day is to quickly clone a popular business model that has worked in the west and innovate under the local constraints.
I can clearly see the curve flattening or even reversing in the next 8-10 years. All in all, it sounds like good news for the Indian economy.
While the VC investments and rise of so many startups is exciting, I am still worried if it is sustainable or everyone is just riding on the VC fuel. Most of the startups, are consumer based companies, many of which, have followed the American counterparts, and to gain market share, they are not worried about spending money like it is endless. Take an example of "Lenskart", which will send an optician to your doorstep who will do eye-check for you @ Rs. 50 ( < $1 ). Not to mention, the sheer number of promotional and branding campaigns they have been running.
I believe not every company is like that, but the startup scene in India is more or less, a gaining-user-share game. In pessimistic future, where these startups would be relying on the last pennies of their funding, I am not sure if they would be able to sustain if they start pricing the things they sell at a price to make a profit, since the Indian consumer finds these offers, the major reason to use the app.
It would be good if the startups also tilt towards actually making products, like VWO, Browserstack and ours[1]. Although, I am aware, that question like, "How the heck that will make money?" has been proved to be pointless at many times in history, if you think of Facebook / Google but I believe eCommerce companies find it hard to grow profits quickly unless they are inventing a new business model (AirBnB, eBay, Alibaba).
E-commerce is a numbers game. Look beyond e-comm and there are plenty of promising product based companies-- Freshdesk, helpshift, zoho, boomerang commerce, indix, pubmatic, zomato, common-floor, housing etc. I think you're being overly pessimistic about the tech scene in India. Flipkart has already made a lot of millionaires, and when other unicorns start going public, we'd start seeing a lot of wealthy individuals that'd turn investors themselves. The key is that critical mass, which I think the Indian tech scene (4th largest in the world in terms of capital, behind US, UK, and China) has already achieved.
> What is the cause? Most likely, an extremely strong self-selecting tendency for immigrants.
As an American I often feel like we don't really appreciate the size of the population of Asia. 3 million Indians in America essentially represents the 0.1% of the Indian population most interested and able to come here, so it should not be surprising that the average performance of that group on many given metrics would be above average.
The able part should not be downplayed either. The mere cost of a ticket to get to the U.S. automatically selects for a relatively high income family as a single ticket costs more than the annual median household income.
As an analogy, it's as if a ticket to Europe cost $60,000 dollars and Europeans marveled at how educated and successful and driven all Americans were. When in reality, just to afford the ticket they would have to be either already successful or extremely driven and focused on that singular goal.
I am very curious about the new indian elite white collar crime rates. It seems like most of the time I see a headline about a bust of medicare/medicaid scams or insider trading. Then you get multiple anecdotes of guys like Vinod Khosla trying to steal a beach. Cheating and bribery is certainly rampant in india. IQ ain't everything, you know.
Not joking. This is what American Indians say when I argue about corruption or workplace politicking - that Americans are much worse and much better at pretending it doesn't exist.
Don't forget the high percentage of English proficiency in India as a whole. That opens a huge range of well-paid mid skilled corporate jobs (ex: software tester) for non-high achieving immigrants (family reunification etc.) This has a significant risk reduction for family's which has a host of positive knock on effects.
Yes i have been generalizing I admit to that crime.
It's a fact that 1% of the best of the best from a country like India that has so huge population will disrupt the local economics. That and the fact that the others not that gifted will work for less than the locals.
We live in a globalized world but that does not always work for benefits of humankind.
They are different cultures...the same as gypsies and poorer social ranks from post-soviet countries.
I would assume the reason this is getting so many upvotes/retweets is this is actually quite surprising to most people, who would still initially consider Indians of lower "social status" at first sight.
Indians in the UK are similar - tend to be high achievers, middle-class, model minority etc.
In fact, perhaps even more so, because a big proportion of the British Indian population were the professional class ejected from East Africa by people like Idi Amin.
Next up, "Down with immigrants!" and "They took my job!" - very ugly tide of anti-immigration sentiment rising in the UK, largely because migrants are prepared to work, and native brits are not, as they feel entitled to a record contract and a pony.
I am an emigrant and even I find it unfair to local population. Basically you are getting the 1% best prepared of India or other countries. Of course locals can't compete.
People feel entitled to what they have and don't want to lost it. You don't need to be an expert in psychology to realize that.
If you have to compete with people that are more desperate that you, you are not going to like that. This is true for Brits and for Indians.
But I suppose it's easy (but lazy) to make a moral play of this.
Downward pressure on wages is good for some people but not most people. Of course the immigrants have a right to the good things of life also, and I don't have a solution, but don't make these issues more simpler than they are.
"Of course the immigrants have a right to the good things of life also"
Maybe we should be fixing their societies? Because letting 0,1% of people in third-world countries come and enjoy good things does nothing for their society in a long run, while it can do considerable harm (or good, for sure!) for the receiving society.
But, is that politically possible?
I would vote for serious resource investment in a plan for finishing the world poverty but I suspect it's not in the program of the political parties.
We prefer to organize military operations ¿!??, like the current European one against the "mafias" that "exploit" the Libyan illegal immigrants, instead of facing the roots of the problem.
letting 0,1% of people in third-world countries come and enjoy good things does nothing for their society in a long run
Sure it does. It alleviates the problem of the (often) explosive population growth, it brings in billions of dollars in remittances, and it allows future returnees to come with education and work experience which is, if not better, at least different from what the origin country provides.
There's a nice example in this week's TAL episode, regarding Kaiser Kuo, the American-born son of Chinese immigrants who "brought rock and roll to China" (by being one of the founders of Tang Dynasty). I think it's clear that the immigration of his parents was essential for his accomplishments.
Taking away 0,1% of people sure doesn't solve the problem of population growth, it's statistically insignificant.
Your other points stand, but only if donor society is in relatively good shape.
Indian emigrants may help India but I doubt Somalian or Libyan emigrants help countries they fled.
Why don't you move to Somalia or Libya and try your best to help them? The pure accident of chance that someone was born in one country and you were born in another does not change your or their obligation to either country.
We are only beholden to our own actions, not those of our ancestors or people who carry the same passport as us.
You are welcome to pursue fixing the world. Doesn't change my opinion that an Indian/Somali/whatever has the same right to a life of comfort as you, since they didn't choose to be born where they did and neither did you.
Despite having the good fortune of being born into quite significant privilege (I'm a white, tall, straight guy born to middle class parents in a western country - if anyone has been playing life on the easiest difficulty level it's me) I'm actually a socialist & believe in income redistribution (choosing to live in Germany has something to do with it - it's much more of a socialist welfare state with high taxes & wealth redistribution than the country I was born in - I would have been making more money and paying less taxes if I stayed there).
Obviously we can't completely equalize the playing field (like tall, good looking people getting better opportunities etc), but I do think we should do as much as we practically can. That's why yes, I do think we should strive for open borders even though it will be significantly non-beneficial to me as a birth-lottery winner.
Although practically I think it will only work out if all or almost all countries will open their borders at the same time, to prevent 100s of millions of people moving into any single country at once. I don't think this will happen in my life time but I sure hope it does.
And on a more concrete note - if I'll have a chance of helping someone from a poor country come to Germany e.g. via offering them employment/visa sponsorship - I will prefer doing that compared to hiring a local.
For some reason you think that mechanically bringing people from foreign country will level the playing field. This is far from truth. You need a large and diverse skillset to "pilot" a developed country (make advantage of its infrastructure, give back). Once you bring in millions of uneducated, unfamiliar and uncaring people, things go south.
You also lie to these people: you tell them that by leaving their communities they will land in developed paradise, but when they arrive they only see themself as 3rd sort, shunned by locals, without prospect of fruitful employment. Of course they'll radicalize.
If you are serious about wanting to make world better, you should implement something like american Green Card but on grand scale. Pre-select qualified applicants by testing (build emigration schools for them perhaps, where they learn how to live in developed countries), distribute entrance permits via lottery, shape their flow, monitor their destiny so you can at any moment prove they are happier than ever, don't hurt the receiving society and productive.
But this is obviously harder than "just opening the gates wide open" or "blaming for the lack of aforementioned".
It's not so much that I think it will automatically help them as much as I think that it's unfair that we restrict people's ability to improve their lot in life because of their nationality.
Moving from one place to another should be their decision, just like a citizen from a poor city can decide to move to a richer city in the same country (or if you wish, a citizen from a poor EU state can move to a rich EU state - same reason why I fully supported poorer countries like Bulgaria, Romania & Croatia joining the EU & hope to see Turkey joining as well at some point in the future).
Not granting them that freedom reduces class mobility, even thought it's not the only element in the equation. We should definitely additionally also try to fix the other factors reducing or limiting class mobility.
> Do they also have right to money already in my wallet?
what in the hell are you talking about? what rights? they're out to GET THEIRS just like everyone else, and they're more than happy to screw you over for it, as they should be. does that not sit well with you? boo fuckin' hoo.
like it or not, brown people are going to continue to come to the US and work/live here like they have for decades if not centuries. you can't stop it no matter how passive aggressive you get on the internet. they might even be smarter and/or harder working than you, which is a shock, i'm sure. and they sure as shit don't have to listen to your cockamamey ideas of staying in a shithole and "fixing" things they have no inclination or obligation to fix.
learn how to compete or die. in the real world nobody gives a shit what your skin color is or what your passport says. you just sound like a pathetic loser when you moan about people taking "your" stuff. if it wasn't them, it'd be someone else, most likely of your own skin color. this is America, land of opportunity, not the land of protectionist nativist crybabies.
Even if it would have been better off for country X to not have some citizen emigrate, it's not a citizen's duty to fix the country they happened to have been born into.
It's like expecting every successful black person to dedicate all their time and resources to "fix the black community" - they have every right to do whatever they wish with their lives just like anyone else.
OP is welcome to go to India and try to fix poverty there if they'd like, leaving behind western comforts & privileges.
Why would anyone do anything for their community with that attitude?
If I were a moderately successful 70-year-old with that attitude, I'd blow my money on vacations or cars before I died instead of leaving money to parks, schools, or starting a scholarship fund.
Which is your right. If you want to do anything for yours or any other community, go ahead!
I personally feel no greater obligation to help other Jews (I happen to be Jewish) than I do to help any other ethnicity in any other country.
And just by the happenstance that I happen to have been born in 1 country (in which I no longer live) I feel no stronger obligation to mark that country as my community rather than another.
> It alleviates the problem of the (often) explosive population growth
Is 0.1% of the population leaving really enough to actually help with this? I'm pretty skeptical of that.
As for your other points, it seems that they all could easily be countered by pointing out the extreme "brain drain" that countries like India are experiencing -- the 0.1% that they're losing are some of the most talented and educated members of their society. That can't be good for them.
...but don't make these issues more simpler than they are.
It makes more sense if you take a Darwinian viewpoint. Survival of the fittest and all that. In the US this happened a couple of hundred years ago as the native population got wiped out by European immigrants (or invaders). In case of the UK, as an Indian, I consider it fair comeuppance for the two centuries that Brits enslaved my country! And, by the way, I'll have some fish-n-chips with that NHS plan, thankyouverymuch.
Darwin never made this claim, nor is it part of natural selection. Natural selection doesn't select for the 'fittest', it selects for the 'fit enough'. It's a minimum threshold, not a maximizing algorithm.
Secondly, the native population of the Americas was mostly killed off by Smallpox. Though military superiority played a role, second to the pox was load bearing animals such as horses.
Interestingly enough, husbandry of large livestock like horses is where diseases like the pox come from. . . and Eurasia is where all of the world's largest domesticated animals come from.
So, Eurasians were able to slowly and gradually build resistance to these livestock oriented diseases.
Short story: Why did all the native americans die off? Pure random chance.
Not that Europeans are guilt free, they did some horrible, morally reprehensible shit. They just, even at their height, couldn't hold a candle to unadulterated, random cruelty of mother nature.
That being said, there is some sweet, sweet irony when the nations that soaked up the entire world's wealth through theft, murder, and subjugation then used it to build empires on the backs of slaves complain about cheap labor taking their stuff.
>>It makes more sense if you take a Darwinian viewpoint. Survival of the fittest and all that.
> Pretty much everyone knows Social Darwinism to be immoral and, on net, a bad idea.
Agreed. Fun side note / trivia: Some wag had Hubert Spencer (the proponent of "social darwinism") buried across the path and facing the grave of his intellectual enemy Karl Marx. It's a well-trodden spot in the lovely Highgate cemetery, and much as I dislike much of what Marx wrote, I love that so maany people make a pilgrimage there and turn their backs on Spencer.
>But I suppose it's easy (but lazy) to make a moral play of this.
Lazier than assuming that because by chance you were born in a particular country you're somehow entitled to get paid more per unit work than people born in other countries?
It's not chance that I was born in a country with world-class freedoms, infrastructure, and and wealth. Previous generations of Americans made decisions, many good and many bad, that resulted in the current state of America.
I would argue that it's mostly fair for Americans to expect that their children, friends, and neighbors reap the benefits of their ingenuity and sacrifice.
I also think Americans should be exceptionally generous (I think they could do a log better), but to believe that everyone just rolled the dice so many decades ago and current Americans just happened to end up on top is to have a real nihilistic approach to history, governance, and culture.
To put it another way, people make sacrifices now to benefit future generations. I'd argue that it's lazy to ignore the influence of history on current affairs.
>I also think Americans should be exceptionally generous (I think they could do a log better), but to believe that everyone just rolled the dice so many decades ago and current Americans just happened to end up on top is to have a real nihilistic approach to history, governance, and culture.
For the record I wasn't implying that the wealth of nations is due to chance. I just meant roll of the dice in that, if there are N babies being born in a given moment, and K of those births are in a well-off country, then a given baby has a K/N chance of being born in a well-off country. Which country it's born in is not the result of any decisions on the baby's part, although I suppose as you point out it could be a result of decisions made by its parents.
>I would argue that it's mostly fair for Americans to expect that their children, friends, and neighbors reap the benefits of their ingenuity and sacrifice.
According to Forbes[1], 40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, and if one assumes those companies are a net benefit to America then immigration isn't necessarily a zero-sum game.
Except baby souls don't come from a giant Pez dispenser in the sky. The chance that you would be born to someone other than your parents are zero. And your parents made decisions that affected your life.
It's a short hop to extrapolate that to the community, city, province, and country you were born in.
Its less about the chance to be born and more about the fault of being born.
This is a moral preference issue and so we can have different views.
Take a less contentious example, good looking people are often thought of as better than their uglier (but equally skilled) colleagues.[1] This is a human cognitive bias, and it takes constant effort
to correct for it.
So the question is, would you prefer a world where the halo effect didn't exist? And since it does exist, would you be averse to compensating ugly people for their misfortune. Do you think because they were born ugly they "deserve" to be treated worse/have less opportunities than their prettier counterparts.
Do you think their parents are to blame instead? Should we disincentivise ugly people from having their own children? After all, pretty people have been selecting each other for generations in order to have prettier kids.
Lazy is to think that it's not human nature to try to defend whatever material progress they have.
Lazy is to argue that the market will solve everything. That the problem is going to be solved leaving workers to compete when, it's obvious that, without a determined effort to end poverty around the world, there is always going to be a limitless source of desperate people.
Lazy is to think that a race to the bottom is not the end game of the current system.
>without a determined effort to end poverty around the world, there is always to be a limitless source of desperate people.
Is this necessarily the case? Average global wages have been increasing steadily, especially in developing countries, so if the current trajectory continues then eventually a stage will be reached where everyone has a "first world" income, even if that takes another hundred years.
I'll remind everyone that it was Democrats who passed the Jim Crow laws. Those laws were passed because racist, leftist people didn't want to compete (i.e. they were against the free market).
The actual human beings who passed the Jim Crow laws weren't "leftists", at least, not if you judge by:
* Articulated leftist principles, as written in, say, the Communist Manifesto, AND
* The fact that these people mostly switched to the Republican Party after the Civil Rights Act was passed, and gave us the Southern Strategy of Nixon and Reagan that basically became modern "conservatism".
It's a bit silly to cite Nixon as a non-leftist, at least as a counterpoint to innguest claiming left wing andi-free market types are pro-segregation.
Nixon was a Republican mainly because he was anti-soviet. His domestic policies included wage and price controls, ending the gold standard, creating the EPA, federalizing medicaid and proposing an Obamacare-like health law. Nixon seems to support innguest's (unnecessarily partisan) point - opposition to civil rights does seem to require opposition to free markets.
If we are going by the political map in usage at the time when Nixon ran and governed, then he was a right-winger. That today's political spectrum is far to the right of Nixon is not a fact about Nixon at all, but instead a fact about history after Nixon.
"by identifying himself with a policy whose purpose was inflation's defeat, Nixon made it difficult for Democratic opponents ... to criticize him. His opponents could offer no alternative policy that was either plausible or believable since the one they favored was one they had designed but which the president had appropriated for himself."
You're tying to convince me that someone passed a law interfering with the market and they are not leftists?
Please. Do you even understand what left and right are?
Right is not where Hitler lives. Hitler lives in the Left together with Democrats. Also not far from Republicans in an American context (unless we wax lyrical about founding fathers). In the right sit Anarchists. So your suggestion that the human beings that passed laws interfering with the market are not leftists is wrong on its face.
No, left and right are not defined by "statist" and "anarcho-capitalist", except in really especially cultish Libertarian Party meetings. Words have meanings:
There is also the problem that, as noted, many/most of the actual individuals behind today's anarcho-capitalist movement are in fact the same people (or their children/grandchildren) behind segregation and Jim Crow. The far-right has changed its propaganda, not its actual ideas.
Leftists love "definitions" just like Christians like quoting from the bible. You can quote from definitions given by your priests, the academics, all you want. Of course they've defined things to make themselves look good.
Leftist churches, I mean, universities, defined leftism to be good and fuzzy and caring and they defined the right to mean evil discriminating people that can't give speeches on campus because leftists won't let them? I'm so surprised.
I'm sorry if the world isn't neatly defined the way you wish but there's no political difference between Hitler and Obama - both think it's OK to bring legalized violence into the free market and both were OK taking money from a group of people and giving that money to another group of people (rich/poor, jew/german).
Your State-sanctioned wikipedia articles are cute but how would you explain to a kid that it's OK to steal from the rich except if they are jewish?
Easy, you tell them the Left has redefined the political axis to make themselves look good, and you tell them there's a group of people in the Right that believe stealing is not OK period, not from the rich, not from jewish people, not from anyone. Kids understand that. Stealing is wrong, even if Obama does it.
In summary, if you think the definition of Left and Right are those given by some French people hundreds of years ago and that the term "evolved in its meaning" then you would benefit from the Chinese proverb:
"the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names"
First, why do we drop the "traditional definitions"? Because they change throughout time. Easy. We need constants. So Philosophy decided that Left is totalitarianism and right is anarchy, that way we neatly have a spectrum where we can place all political ideas! Isn't that neat? Isn't that more useful than a changing definition that people have to consult Encyclopedias to talk about? That old leftist strategy of delaying the debate by saying "you don't even know what such and such means", lately seen employed by feminists (another group that only looks at the definition of the word, and not the actions of those who say they espouse the ideology).
See, this is why Report buttons exist: for when someone starts claiming that Wikipedia (founded by an ardent Libertarian) is "state-sanctioned", that universities are "leftist churches" (so what about UChicago Economics, George Mason, and various Catholic institutions?), and "there's no political difference between Hitler and Obama".
Please, go back to /r/Libertarian.
And by the way, just who, exactly, is "Philosophy"?
First of all, you did not address my points. You are now engaged in mocking me and avoiding the debate. I'm just telling you so you know, because leftists have a problem seeing reality. Right now you are not debating with me, you are ignoring the points I've made under the pretense that they are ridiculous and worthy only of some other forum but not this one. On top of that you are suggesting I leave this forum, which is to say, that I do not make the points I'm making on this forum. Usually, people want to keep certain "arguments" away from them because they don't have a good defense against them, and the truth hurts. That seems to be the case here, since not only do you do that (suggest I leave so my arguments don't cause cognitive dissonance in you) but also you do not seriously attempt to refute my arguments.
> this is why Report buttons exist: for when someone starts claiming that (...) universities are "leftist churches" (so what about UChicago Economics, George Mason, and various Catholic institutions?),
So report buttons exist for when someone is wrong? We should call it the Wrong button, then, and not give anyone a chance to improve on their points. Just report them as soon as they are wrong. You have such great ideas.
Wow, two examples and then a catch-all Catholic example to prove that universities are not indoctrination camps for leftists. How am I ever going to refute this? I know. I can retract what I said and offer a correction: Most universities are nothing more than leftist churches. I can also offer some corollaries. All universities that offer women studies are leftist churches by force of circumstance. If a university has only one course, Economics, and that one course does not preach Keynesianism, then that would be an example of a university that is not a leftist church. So, thanks for helping me make my point more precise.
> this is why Report buttons exist: for when someone starts claiming that Wikipedia (founded by an ardent Libertarian) is "state-sanctioned"
So report buttons exist for when a leftist has no answer to an argument? We should rename that the Leftist button, then.
You're still focused on definitions and intentions.
"The founder of Wikipedia is libertarian, therefore it is preposterous to suggest they have a leftist bias".
Why not simply judge Wikipedia by what it is now in the present moment and the actions its constituents take and what articles specifically they choose to censor and what articles they choose to make prominent? How about judging it based on what bits of History they choose to put in the main article and what uncomfortable bits they relegate to the archived talk pages where they can act like their Academic counterparts and censor and insult those that disagree with them?
Why are leftists so incapable of judging people, groups, ideologies, tools, by their actions, and not what the label says? You just did that so you should be able to give me an answer. Why do you think that the political inclinations of the person that founded a community will necessarily persist? Do you not see that the very United States is counter-example to that silly idea of yours? Have enlightenment ideals persisted throughout the American community just because its founders were Enlightenment philosophers?
> this is why Report buttons exist: for when someone starts claiming that (...) "there's no political difference between Hitler and Obama"
So report buttons exist for when someone makes a principled statement focused on one aspect of the issue? We should call that the "No generalizations" button, while being careful to ignore the self-contradiction and resulting paradox.
I believe the argument I made was more complete and so it doesn't lend itself as easily to comedy fodder for your jokes. I said that there's no political difference between Hitler and Obama when it comes to their stance on legalized violence interfering in the market. You did not refut...
Those evil invading Anglo-Saxons immigrated to the lower half of Britannia and now rule the entire island. Why, they even have the gall to name part of it Angle-land!
Colonial empire was a comparatively brief period of history, and there are hints that maintaining colonies was a net loss economically. Of course, from the perspective of power (and bringing nice perks for the elite) it was a different story.
European Wars (such as the Netherlands war), collapsing internal industries resulting in a shift from exporter to importer, internal revolts like the Moricos Revolt, and lack of investment in industry, and Phillip's penchant for foolish and grandiose national project bankrupted Spain.
Throw in a couple of plagues and failed crops as salt in the wounds and that's a wrap.
The massive influx of bouillon and spoils from the Americas were the only thing that kept up the facade for any length of time. Spain's problems were entirely domestic.
At least according to the history books I've read.
It's another version "doing the jobs [white nationality] won't do" canard, which you hear all the time in the "debate" about immigration from Mexico to the USA (legal and otherwise). It really means "doing the jobs [white nationality] won't do at well-below-market wages".
It's a way of lending Narrative to the purely economic nature of mass immigration -- we're expected to believe that it's about bringing in "innovators", or "hard-working people just looking for a chance", or "people who want to make a better life for themselves". In reality mass immigration is entirely about business and elites undercutting wages and replacing the local population with a cheaper one. It's the same for farm owners hiring illegals as it is for Mark Zuckerberg lobbying for more H1Bs.
There's a finite demand for farm work. But when SV succeeds in creating a new Google using H1B labor, it benefits whole country and also creates more jobs, even for native population.
The Narrative is that H1Bs have some kind of magical entrepreneurial powers that do not exist in the native population, thus we must increase their numbers dramatically so that we do not fall into a dark age of innovation. This is nonsense. Silicon Valley was innovating long before the existence of the H1B visa.
Bullshit. Native Brits have red hair and blue eyes, if there to be any such thing as a native - and the Picts came from what is now the North Sea - should we "send them back"? The habitants of this island are Normans, Romans, Vikings, Huguenots, Calvinists and many others who invaded or fled to Britain.
This is correct IMHO. Nu Labour made a big mistake in banning "hate speech". Being authoritarian scum Nu Labour thought you can't persuade working people not to be racist (as Nu Labour hate the working class). So they banned it instead. Now we have more economic problems and people are starting to defy the ban to complain about immigrants with the rise of UKIP.
In the UK we will see a big spike in racism because instead of persuading people racism is wrong they simply suppressed it. Big mistake.
The Left (the people concerned with racism, who don't understand racism is counter-productive and no one would choose it in the free-market) is not concerned with persuading anyone of anything. Remember the USSR? Did they persuade 100 million people? No, they killed them. Killing is an extreme form of suppression. The UK isn't there yet, but it's getting there:
"For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'" -- David Cameron
He's saying "I've had enough tolerating law-abiding citizens that disagree with Leftism". You know what comes after that.
So one way you can interpret that is to think "oh yeah he's saying 'it's getting there!' with the wag of the finger as if to say it's moving towards a more communist approach". Which seems fair to me, given Cameron's quote.
The other way to interpret that is to think "oh wow, this internet person thinks that the UK is about to turn into something exactly like the USSR".
Which one do you think applies? Don't answer me, I don't care, answer yourself and ask what does that say about you.
Careful there! It's easy to paint a broad stroke, when the reality is more nuanced.
When employers adopt a race to the bottom on salary and skill level, then yes, the plumber replaced by an eastern European counterpart, or a programmer replaced by someone who will "do the needful" may feel some resentment.
But it is easy and cheap to paint a nation with the same viewpoint.
It's really the same argument that public schools make about private schools. We basically discard a third or more of our population, and import the cream of the crop from India.
You combine that with natural ethnic affiliations and social connections and you have a smart and powerful minority. Honestly, it's the same phenomenon as my Irish family had 40 years ago in municipal government. We had cops, firemen, tradesmen. If something needed to be done, you asked my grandfather and it happened. The difference is that those relatives had great high school educations (through the catholic church) in blue collar-ish jobs, while the Indian phenomenon is high end engineering.
Or perhaps any anti-immigration sentiment is a result of other factors, such as the rise of unwanted religious extremism, or support for and the acceptance by some groups of Sharia law.
Saying Brits are not prepared to work is not correct. Many migrants are coming in temporarily and are saving for a home back where they came from. For them UK wages represent a fair deal per hour relative to land prices in their country of origin.
If you live in the UK land prices have detached from wages. Really my only motivation for working hard in the UK was to gain the qualifications to emigrate.
The UK has big problems due to a collapsing economy propped up by land prices which it is using to print money. This then has knock-on consequences such as social tensions.
Quebec - would never have gone to Vancouver. They can stay there and be slaves to the bankers whilst telling themselves they made it big in a $1m shack, even though if they move they have to buy another $1m shack and pay a fortune in fees.
How come these problems with land prices are only in the UK? It's not like in Canada, Australia, or even India where land prices will go down and become more affordable or increase proportionately to income? There's a very well known land price problem in Melbourne, Vancouver, Sydney.
I think the newspapers in the UK have done a great job of exploiting everyone's grievances with house prices.
Some countries actually dream of having house price increases, I might want to point that out. It is a way to create wealth and increase standards of living very effectively.
>Print money
This phrase seems to imply they literally print money and everyone seems to pile on. Surely you know at the end of QE they will be removing the money from the system in the same way they added it in. QE ended in the UK ages ago.
QE in the UK has already ended they stopped rolling over gilts over a year ago. So all that 'printed' money is being destroyed as the gilts term to maturity (with interest added to it). If they cancelled them instead it would be printing but they don't do that.
Of course, I can't attest to where the banks lend their money if a large proportion of customers take mortgages it speaks for itself. I merely point out this is not an issue that is exclusively a UK problem.
UK is one of the worst. They stopped the housing bubble bursting and since then they've had numerous schemes culminating in the UK govt directly loaning part of mortgages to underwrite risk as banks stay away from insane leverage.
The UK is one of the worst offenders. Without house prices more than trebling in nominal terms since 1997 much of UK "growth" would not be there.
Right now Cameron is post-queen's speech fluffing up right2buy which is basically an attempt to get more mortgages to get more cash as the UK stalls once again.
I think it depends. If you got a mortgage in at the lows you would be rather happy getting a large bit of the house 'free'. It's not always a bad thing when stuff gets expensive. Try getting a mortgage where property prices tend not to keep their value.
I've lived in a place where they struggle to get land prices going up and it's awful. It's way better to have the problem the UK has than to have it going down. Even the support infrastructure (police, etc) deteriorates to the point you get disgusted with crime. My car's side mirror gets stolen and even the police wouldn't care about it even If I have to buy it back from them.
In the UK its mostly surrounding London, there are parts of the UK where land is affordable.
I'm quite familiar with the UK's schemes including right-to-buy. Probably not a good idea since its just guaranteeing a portion of the deposit. Makes people buy what they can't afford.. (subprime?)
I might want to point out the UK is doing quite well alongside a great number of western nations (even though they're cutting their budget). I'm not politically inclined to Tories but this fact can't be distorted.
You are looking at this from a fixed point in time. Places like Detroit had a problem because they pumped land prices then let them collapse.
The answer is not to pump land prices by stopping the banks ramping them.
The UK is not doing well. If you look at flawed indicators like GDP, 10% of which is made up of imputed rent, then yes you will be fooled.
"Facts" can be distorted, in particular GDP.
The parts of the UK that are affordable are not affordable as the wages there are far lower. The loan to value in many places is bad and only tenable due to ultra-low rates which the UK is now boxed into.
Even more ironic is that these 2/3rd gen Brits are not to keen on the newer Eastern European immigrants.
I remember being a bit shocked by one of my school mates (on of the Ugandan Asians expelled by Amin) saying that he could understand voting for the BNP.
Yet more ironic is as yet unnaturalised migrants railing against immigrants - was a few days ago chatting to a Russian lass in London who was complaining about "Eastern Europeans" coming and taking "our jobs".
I just find the whole concept of nationality bizarre.
I don't know anything about Filipino demographics but a LOT of Indians that come to the US who aren't highly educated, end up starting small businesses in retail, etc, because that doesn't require a high degree, just raw hard work and perseverance. And those translate to really good incomes.
It's probably because a large share of them work on ships(both, trade and passenger ships [1]) where unqualified workers often can earn slightly more. (I did not find a source on comparable wages, probably someone else has data on that...)
I think there was discussion about taxes in India some time ago. If you make decent money in India, you get taxed to oblivion. No wonder their elite is leaving.
This is not a news to me. India lacks opportunities for skilled people. Even with very few opportunities the competition here is fierce. For eg, to get into IIM or IIT (equivalents of Harvard or MIT in US), you need more then just knowledge to get selected amongst hundreds of thousands.
Even after studies the competition is fierce. The Indian middle class dream continues to pursue job as a career and very few take entrepreneurship as a career.
>For eg, to get into IIM or IIT (equivalents of Harvard or MIT in US), you need more then just knowledge to get selected amongst hundreds of thousands.
This is untrue. They all have competitive examinations that are open to anyone. There is affirmative action after admission which is the only non-merit part of it. Generally in India, there is age discrimination when it comes to enrolling in schools. There are age limits. Of course examinations are not indicative of actual potential but then we need a quantifiable way to select students. I am also Indian and have participated in these examinations. Also, I never thought IIMs/IITs are Harvard/MIT. Year over year rankings of universities around the world indicate they are nowhere closer. So let's get real there as well.
>>The Indian middle class dream continues to pursue job as a career and very few take entrepreneurship as a career.
Same like middle class everywhere in the world. Failure is the norm in entrepreneurship, success is an exception. If some one's parents slogged their whole just to get their kids decent education, and all the kids did in return is blow up their their working years experimenting, I don't think the kid has respect for what their parents did.
Contrary to whatever you might think, there are as much opportunities in the US, as they are in India. It all depends on how far you are ready to go. In the US, Indians who are even on short term visits work for dog hours, do the same in India. The result should hardly be different.
An Indian immigrant family that makes it to the US is likely to be exceptional. When people fight immigration this is one side of it. The best and brightest want to come to the US and the US benefits if it simply lets them do it.
Caveat: If you are not American, a natural citizen, or even a second generation immigrant; please refrain from suppressing dissenting opinion I am expressing below, which you will surely not like. Also, man, this got long in short order. But it's an important topic.
Now if they could just learn to properly speak English. I know that sounds like something an asshole says, but it's really an issue that should not be overlooked just because someone has been trained to be politically correct and for some reason accept poor language skills by one group of people, yet not from another. Would you be ok with a black person that speaks "ebonics" but is otherwise equally competent?
In reality it is a significant issue because you frequently simply cannot understand those of Indian descent unless they have been in the USA for at least a generation. It's not really limited to Indians, it also and ever more frequently applies to Chinese, but they are not the subject of this article. There are whole departments in tech companies that are staffed with essentially nothing but Indians who speak various Indian languages among each other and have such strong dialects when speaking English that it is almost impossible to understand them. There is even explicit discrimination going on in those kinds of companies that prevents someone like a "real American", a person who speaks English to a satisfactory and comprehensible degree from being hired. Are you going to work with a whole department of Indians that speak a foreign language to each other and actively ostracize you? Are you even going to get an interview as a Duane, Chad, Becky, Omar, Mercedes, Juliana, Marcos, etc.?
This rise of the "burgeoning new elite" is just another symptom of the corporate and elite sell out of America. Indians were allowed to immigrate to the USA through various visa programs in order to quickly bolster corporate tech capacity on the cheap due to the ramifications of incompetent investments in education and insufficient support for engaging our poor and under-educated people. Essentially, America's corporate overlords took the easy route and sold out Americans by kicking the can down the road. What they did was the equivalent of taking out car title and pay day loans in order to fund their lavish lifestyles of exploitation.
What should become more and more apparent to people, although I don't see any real signs of it happening or grabbing hold, is that America is nothing but a big feeding frenzy by the wealthy and powerful. There really is no sense of culture and society worth mentioning. As upsetting as that notion is, what we consider American and defining of our culture is really just all expression corporate interests and exploitation.
What people don't quite get about America, even the 99%ers of Americans, is that although the economy is of course not a zero sum game, it is a limited game that can be represented by the ever popular pie, but where the pie represents a ratio of wealth and income. Or, another way of putting it, you can think of it as an ever replenishing pie. Do you have your mental model and visualization in place? Ok, let me explain.
The thing about America is that there is a defined barrier, a gated community, if you will, between the 1% and 99% and that barrier has been erected in such a manner that 99% of the ever replenishing parts of the pie go to the 1%, or simply that the 1% get 99% of the pie and the rest of the 99% have to share a single sliver of 100 pieces that the pie is cut into. The problem with immigration, whether illegal laborers or H1B, is that they are all dumped into the same pool of 99% that have to share that one single tiny sliver of pie of the 100 pieces that the pie has been cut into, which makes getting ahead or increasing income next to impossible.
Sure there are outliers and exceptions, and I am sure that the "success" of these "burgeoning new elite" would be cited as counter arguments, but the rule simply is that und...
> Now if they could just learn to properly speak English.
You mean British English?
> There are whole departments in tech companies that are staffed with essentially nothing but Indians who speak various Indian languages among each other and have such strong dialects when speaking English that it is almost impossible to understand them.
Every country has an accent - US, Australia, Germany or France - each one of them have their own accent.
I think the point was that most Indians speak in their local languages at work. Which is actually true. It can be very annoying to Indians themselves, I wouldn't be surprised if its any different for other people.
One of the fun and excellent things about America is that there is no official language (/ religion / whatever).
My housekeeper, a US citizen born in Mexico (her father was American), speaks English marginally at best (she had a high school education in Mexico). But she has put two kids through the Palo Alto schools (with another graduating next year); the oldest has a graduate degree and works overseas. She lives in Palo Alto and owns another house in the foothills. She votes, and politicians who want her vote speak to her (via TV) in Spanish. Companies who want to sell her things advertise in Spanish. Isn't that capitalism at its best?
Now I think she's made a poor choice, because I think it's self-disenfranchising to not speak English. But that's her choice to make and it's hard to argue with her success. Plus she's a citizen and it appears quite reasonable to me that my taxes pay for the government to accommodate the linguistic wishes of large blocks of citizens.
This how The Economist promoted their own article on Twitter: "Indians have become an extraordinarily successful minority in America. A burgeoning new elite" (https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/603433973361041408), as I had pointed out in the first comment here.
While this doesn't fit into the 80 characters HN enforces, and The Economist may have been "editorializing" by using that alternative title, they editorialize by definition and I'm not sure stepping in and changing the title was necessary here.
The surprisingness of The Economist making that statement is what made that widely retweeted and made for interesting discussion here. Or was it the quotes that were "problematic" / offensive?
The rules here ask you to use the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait. It's fine to use a subtitle instead, if it's more neutral or informative. What's not fine is to pick what you think is important about the article and make that the title—that's what we mean by editorializing.
On HN, the submitter of a story doesn't get to frame it for everybody else. Since the title of a post is the single most important influence on the discussion, this is important.
The immigration routes to the United States that have nothing to do with personal merit (family reunification, green card lottery) have hard per-country caps. Thanks to India's huge population, a greater percentage of their immigrants have to come from more merit-based routes, like the H-1B visa or the F-1 visa for students. I suspect that's why Indian immigrants are doing better as a group.
The whole article is a strong argument for moving the United States' immigration policy in a more merit-based direction, like Canada's or Australia's. Skilled, deliberately-selected immigrants are great, but giving out permanent residence to the winners of a lottery is ridiculous.
India does one thing interesting in regards to its diaspora.
Like some HNers here advocate for the US, India restricts foreign ownership of things like land, companies etc. (Personally I think it hurts India but that's another discussion.)
So if someone leaves India and becomes a citizen of another country they lose those rights. A couple of decades ago the government figured out this was a problem, so now Indian-born noncitizens and some decedents of Indian citizens get some ability to travel, invest etc as if they were locals -- even better in some cases because they can repatriate earnings).
As a kid in South East Asia I saw how Chinese family-based affinity networks contributed to the well being, wealth and general prosperity of Cantonese immigrants (my mother, an Indian childhood emigrant who grew up speaking chinese, was weirdly tied in which is how I saw these).
India's emigrants for whatever reason didn't have the same kind of informal structure, but cleverly the government formalized the mechanism which is actually more powerful. Let's see if they can really make use of it.
>India's emigrants for whatever reason didn't have the same kind of informal structure, but cleverly the government formalized the mechanism which is actually more powerful. Let's see if they can really make use of it.
You are wrong about this.
I was brought up in precisely such a culture in Africa and see it everywhere that Indians migrate to in reasonable numbers.
136 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadWhat is the cause? Most likely, an extremely strong self-selecting tendency for immigrants. Most of the Indian immigrants I know attended one of the IITs, and I'm sure many here have a similar experience. The flipside of this self-selection is a pronounced brain drain on Indian society. It will be very interesting over the next two decades to see if, with the rise of India, this trend continues, flattens, or even reverses. Even with the current level of investment, however, the new "model minority" is likely to stay that way for a while.
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
The way people quote it, you'd think it was straight out of the Constitution or Declaration of Independence or something. The fact that the poem was written after the Chinese Exclusion Act was written makes it something of a farce, IMHO.
This is true. I graduated from one of the well-known engineering colleges 4 years back in India and a good percentage of my CS batch went to study in top-schools in the US with a primary motivation to get a job and get settled.
Fast forward to now, most of them are looking at coming back and thinking of getting a slice of pie in the booming tech / Ecommerce market in the country. With VC investments booming, and mobile penetration rising tremendously (even in tier 2 cities / towns) the order of the day is to quickly clone a popular business model that has worked in the west and innovate under the local constraints.
I can clearly see the curve flattening or even reversing in the next 8-10 years. All in all, it sounds like good news for the Indian economy.
I believe not every company is like that, but the startup scene in India is more or less, a gaining-user-share game. In pessimistic future, where these startups would be relying on the last pennies of their funding, I am not sure if they would be able to sustain if they start pricing the things they sell at a price to make a profit, since the Indian consumer finds these offers, the major reason to use the app.
It would be good if the startups also tilt towards actually making products, like VWO, Browserstack and ours[1]. Although, I am aware, that question like, "How the heck that will make money?" has been proved to be pointless at many times in history, if you think of Facebook / Google but I believe eCommerce companies find it hard to grow profits quickly unless they are inventing a new business model (AirBnB, eBay, Alibaba).
[1]: http://adpushup.com
Also see: http://yourstory.com/2015/04/indian-entrepreneurs-merger-acq... and http://yourstory.com/2015/04/billion-dollar-company-india/
As an American I often feel like we don't really appreciate the size of the population of Asia. 3 million Indians in America essentially represents the 0.1% of the Indian population most interested and able to come here, so it should not be surprising that the average performance of that group on many given metrics would be above average.
As an analogy, it's as if a ticket to Europe cost $60,000 dollars and Europeans marveled at how educated and successful and driven all Americans were. When in reality, just to afford the ticket they would have to be either already successful or extremely driven and focused on that singular goal.
I am very curious about the new indian elite white collar crime rates. It seems like most of the time I see a headline about a bust of medicare/medicaid scams or insider trading. Then you get multiple anecdotes of guys like Vinod Khosla trying to steal a beach. Cheating and bribery is certainly rampant in india. IQ ain't everything, you know.
Not joking. This is what American Indians say when I argue about corruption or workplace politicking - that Americans are much worse and much better at pretending it doesn't exist.
translating : There are more indian immigrants than the other nationalities.
It's a fact that 1% of the best of the best from a country like India that has so huge population will disrupt the local economics. That and the fact that the others not that gifted will work for less than the locals.
We live in a globalized world but that does not always work for benefits of humankind.
They are different cultures...the same as gypsies and poorer social ranks from post-soviet countries.
https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/603433973361041408
Or maybe that's just a UK thing?
In fact, perhaps even more so, because a big proportion of the British Indian population were the professional class ejected from East Africa by people like Idi Amin.
If you have to compete with people that are more desperate that you, you are not going to like that. This is true for Brits and for Indians.
But I suppose it's easy (but lazy) to make a moral play of this.
Downward pressure on wages is good for some people but not most people. Of course the immigrants have a right to the good things of life also, and I don't have a solution, but don't make these issues more simpler than they are.
Maybe we should be fixing their societies? Because letting 0,1% of people in third-world countries come and enjoy good things does nothing for their society in a long run, while it can do considerable harm (or good, for sure!) for the receiving society.
But, is that politically possible? I would vote for serious resource investment in a plan for finishing the world poverty but I suspect it's not in the program of the political parties.
We prefer to organize military operations ¿!??, like the current European one against the "mafias" that "exploit" the Libyan illegal immigrants, instead of facing the roots of the problem.
Sure it does. It alleviates the problem of the (often) explosive population growth, it brings in billions of dollars in remittances, and it allows future returnees to come with education and work experience which is, if not better, at least different from what the origin country provides.
There's a nice example in this week's TAL episode, regarding Kaiser Kuo, the American-born son of Chinese immigrants who "brought rock and roll to China" (by being one of the founders of Tang Dynasty). I think it's clear that the immigration of his parents was essential for his accomplishments.
Your other points stand, but only if donor society is in relatively good shape. Indian emigrants may help India but I doubt Somalian or Libyan emigrants help countries they fled.
We are only beholden to our own actions, not those of our ancestors or people who carry the same passport as us.
That's now how the world works now, and the only way to get what you declare is fixing all the countries and uniting Earth.
Because, rights and privileges (for example, developed country social safety net) is a kind of capital.
Obviously we can't completely equalize the playing field (like tall, good looking people getting better opportunities etc), but I do think we should do as much as we practically can. That's why yes, I do think we should strive for open borders even though it will be significantly non-beneficial to me as a birth-lottery winner.
Although practically I think it will only work out if all or almost all countries will open their borders at the same time, to prevent 100s of millions of people moving into any single country at once. I don't think this will happen in my life time but I sure hope it does.
And on a more concrete note - if I'll have a chance of helping someone from a poor country come to Germany e.g. via offering them employment/visa sponsorship - I will prefer doing that compared to hiring a local.
You also lie to these people: you tell them that by leaving their communities they will land in developed paradise, but when they arrive they only see themself as 3rd sort, shunned by locals, without prospect of fruitful employment. Of course they'll radicalize.
If you are serious about wanting to make world better, you should implement something like american Green Card but on grand scale. Pre-select qualified applicants by testing (build emigration schools for them perhaps, where they learn how to live in developed countries), distribute entrance permits via lottery, shape their flow, monitor their destiny so you can at any moment prove they are happier than ever, don't hurt the receiving society and productive.
But this is obviously harder than "just opening the gates wide open" or "blaming for the lack of aforementioned".
Moving from one place to another should be their decision, just like a citizen from a poor city can decide to move to a richer city in the same country (or if you wish, a citizen from a poor EU state can move to a rich EU state - same reason why I fully supported poorer countries like Bulgaria, Romania & Croatia joining the EU & hope to see Turkey joining as well at some point in the future).
Not granting them that freedom reduces class mobility, even thought it's not the only element in the equation. We should definitely additionally also try to fix the other factors reducing or limiting class mobility.
what in the hell are you talking about? what rights? they're out to GET THEIRS just like everyone else, and they're more than happy to screw you over for it, as they should be. does that not sit well with you? boo fuckin' hoo.
like it or not, brown people are going to continue to come to the US and work/live here like they have for decades if not centuries. you can't stop it no matter how passive aggressive you get on the internet. they might even be smarter and/or harder working than you, which is a shock, i'm sure. and they sure as shit don't have to listen to your cockamamey ideas of staying in a shithole and "fixing" things they have no inclination or obligation to fix.
learn how to compete or die. in the real world nobody gives a shit what your skin color is or what your passport says. you just sound like a pathetic loser when you moan about people taking "your" stuff. if it wasn't them, it'd be someone else, most likely of your own skin color. this is America, land of opportunity, not the land of protectionist nativist crybabies.
Because that would be Imperialism, which only the Russians and Chinese are allowed to engage in these days.
It's like expecting every successful black person to dedicate all their time and resources to "fix the black community" - they have every right to do whatever they wish with their lives just like anyone else.
OP is welcome to go to India and try to fix poverty there if they'd like, leaving behind western comforts & privileges.
If I were a moderately successful 70-year-old with that attitude, I'd blow my money on vacations or cars before I died instead of leaving money to parks, schools, or starting a scholarship fund.
I personally feel no greater obligation to help other Jews (I happen to be Jewish) than I do to help any other ethnicity in any other country.
And just by the happenstance that I happen to have been born in 1 country (in which I no longer live) I feel no stronger obligation to mark that country as my community rather than another.
> It alleviates the problem of the (often) explosive population growth
Is 0.1% of the population leaving really enough to actually help with this? I'm pretty skeptical of that.
As for your other points, it seems that they all could easily be countered by pointing out the extreme "brain drain" that countries like India are experiencing -- the 0.1% that they're losing are some of the most talented and educated members of their society. That can't be good for them.
It makes more sense if you take a Darwinian viewpoint. Survival of the fittest and all that. In the US this happened a couple of hundred years ago as the native population got wiped out by European immigrants (or invaders). In case of the UK, as an Indian, I consider it fair comeuppance for the two centuries that Brits enslaved my country! And, by the way, I'll have some fish-n-chips with that NHS plan, thankyouverymuch.
A couple of good friends of mine were depressed, because their kid preferred Western food.
I told them to relax. "If she ends up like a native Swede, consider what food we native Swedes really love -- Indian! You can't lose. :-)"
Darwin never made this claim, nor is it part of natural selection. Natural selection doesn't select for the 'fittest', it selects for the 'fit enough'. It's a minimum threshold, not a maximizing algorithm.
Secondly, the native population of the Americas was mostly killed off by Smallpox. Though military superiority played a role, second to the pox was load bearing animals such as horses.
Interestingly enough, husbandry of large livestock like horses is where diseases like the pox come from. . . and Eurasia is where all of the world's largest domesticated animals come from.
So, Eurasians were able to slowly and gradually build resistance to these livestock oriented diseases.
Short story: Why did all the native americans die off? Pure random chance.
Not that Europeans are guilt free, they did some horrible, morally reprehensible shit. They just, even at their height, couldn't hold a candle to unadulterated, random cruelty of mother nature.
That being said, there is some sweet, sweet irony when the nations that soaked up the entire world's wealth through theft, murder, and subjugation then used it to build empires on the backs of slaves complain about cheap labor taking their stuff.
So enjoy the fish & chips and NHS!
Pretty much everyone knows Social Darwinism to be immoral and, on net, a bad idea.
>And, by the way, I'll have some fish-n-chips with that NHS plan, thankyouverymuch.
Fish-and-chips was actually introduced by Sefardi Jewish immigrants from the Netherlands :-p.
> Pretty much everyone knows Social Darwinism to be immoral and, on net, a bad idea.
Agreed. Fun side note / trivia: Some wag had Hubert Spencer (the proponent of "social darwinism") buried across the path and facing the grave of his intellectual enemy Karl Marx. It's a well-trodden spot in the lovely Highgate cemetery, and much as I dislike much of what Marx wrote, I love that so maany people make a pilgrimage there and turn their backs on Spencer.
Lazier than assuming that because by chance you were born in a particular country you're somehow entitled to get paid more per unit work than people born in other countries?
It's not chance that I was born in a country with world-class freedoms, infrastructure, and and wealth. Previous generations of Americans made decisions, many good and many bad, that resulted in the current state of America.
I would argue that it's mostly fair for Americans to expect that their children, friends, and neighbors reap the benefits of their ingenuity and sacrifice.
I also think Americans should be exceptionally generous (I think they could do a log better), but to believe that everyone just rolled the dice so many decades ago and current Americans just happened to end up on top is to have a real nihilistic approach to history, governance, and culture.
To put it another way, people make sacrifices now to benefit future generations. I'd argue that it's lazy to ignore the influence of history on current affairs.
For the record I wasn't implying that the wealth of nations is due to chance. I just meant roll of the dice in that, if there are N babies being born in a given moment, and K of those births are in a well-off country, then a given baby has a K/N chance of being born in a well-off country. Which country it's born in is not the result of any decisions on the baby's part, although I suppose as you point out it could be a result of decisions made by its parents.
>I would argue that it's mostly fair for Americans to expect that their children, friends, and neighbors reap the benefits of their ingenuity and sacrifice.
According to Forbes[1], 40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, and if one assumes those companies are a net benefit to America then immigration isn't necessarily a zero-sum game.
1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2011/06/19/40-per...
It's a short hop to extrapolate that to the community, city, province, and country you were born in.
This is a moral preference issue and so we can have different views.
Take a less contentious example, good looking people are often thought of as better than their uglier (but equally skilled) colleagues.[1] This is a human cognitive bias, and it takes constant effort to correct for it.
So the question is, would you prefer a world where the halo effect didn't exist? And since it does exist, would you be averse to compensating ugly people for their misfortune. Do you think because they were born ugly they "deserve" to be treated worse/have less opportunities than their prettier counterparts.
Do you think their parents are to blame instead? Should we disincentivise ugly people from having their own children? After all, pretty people have been selecting each other for generations in order to have prettier kids.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
Lazy is to think that it's not human nature to try to defend whatever material progress they have.
Lazy is to argue that the market will solve everything. That the problem is going to be solved leaving workers to compete when, it's obvious that, without a determined effort to end poverty around the world, there is always going to be a limitless source of desperate people.
Lazy is to think that a race to the bottom is not the end game of the current system.
Is this necessarily the case? Average global wages have been increasing steadily, especially in developing countries, so if the current trajectory continues then eventually a stage will be reached where everyone has a "first world" income, even if that takes another hundred years.
I guess it's also lazy to make a moral argument against Jim Crow?
That's what you get when leftists legislate.
* Articulated leftist principles, as written in, say, the Communist Manifesto, AND
* The fact that these people mostly switched to the Republican Party after the Civil Rights Act was passed, and gave us the Southern Strategy of Nixon and Reagan that basically became modern "conservatism".
Nixon was a Republican mainly because he was anti-soviet. His domestic policies included wage and price controls, ending the gold standard, creating the EPA, federalizing medicaid and proposing an Obamacare-like health law. Nixon seems to support innguest's (unnecessarily partisan) point - opposition to civil rights does seem to require opposition to free markets.
"by identifying himself with a policy whose purpose was inflation's defeat, Nixon made it difficult for Democratic opponents ... to criticize him. His opponents could offer no alternative policy that was either plausible or believable since the one they favored was one they had designed but which the president had appropriated for himself."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon#Economy
I guess the 1970's Democrats were also not left wing?
You're tying to convince me that someone passed a law interfering with the market and they are not leftists?
Please. Do you even understand what left and right are?
Right is not where Hitler lives. Hitler lives in the Left together with Democrats. Also not far from Republicans in an American context (unless we wax lyrical about founding fathers). In the right sit Anarchists. So your suggestion that the human beings that passed laws interfering with the market are not leftists is wrong on its face.
* Left: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics
* Right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_politics
There is also the problem that, as noted, many/most of the actual individuals behind today's anarcho-capitalist movement are in fact the same people (or their children/grandchildren) behind segregation and Jim Crow. The far-right has changed its propaganda, not its actual ideas.
Leftist churches, I mean, universities, defined leftism to be good and fuzzy and caring and they defined the right to mean evil discriminating people that can't give speeches on campus because leftists won't let them? I'm so surprised.
I'm sorry if the world isn't neatly defined the way you wish but there's no political difference between Hitler and Obama - both think it's OK to bring legalized violence into the free market and both were OK taking money from a group of people and giving that money to another group of people (rich/poor, jew/german).
Your State-sanctioned wikipedia articles are cute but how would you explain to a kid that it's OK to steal from the rich except if they are jewish?
Easy, you tell them the Left has redefined the political axis to make themselves look good, and you tell them there's a group of people in the Right that believe stealing is not OK period, not from the rich, not from jewish people, not from anyone. Kids understand that. Stealing is wrong, even if Obama does it.
In summary, if you think the definition of Left and Right are those given by some French people hundreds of years ago and that the term "evolved in its meaning" then you would benefit from the Chinese proverb:
"the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names"
First, why do we drop the "traditional definitions"? Because they change throughout time. Easy. We need constants. So Philosophy decided that Left is totalitarianism and right is anarchy, that way we neatly have a spectrum where we can place all political ideas! Isn't that neat? Isn't that more useful than a changing definition that people have to consult Encyclopedias to talk about? That old leftist strategy of delaying the debate by saying "you don't even know what such and such means", lately seen employed by feminists (another group that only looks at the definition of the word, and not the actions of those who say they espouse the ideology).
Please, go back to /r/Libertarian.
And by the way, just who, exactly, is "Philosophy"?
> this is why Report buttons exist: for when someone starts claiming that (...) universities are "leftist churches" (so what about UChicago Economics, George Mason, and various Catholic institutions?),
So report buttons exist for when someone is wrong? We should call it the Wrong button, then, and not give anyone a chance to improve on their points. Just report them as soon as they are wrong. You have such great ideas.
Wow, two examples and then a catch-all Catholic example to prove that universities are not indoctrination camps for leftists. How am I ever going to refute this? I know. I can retract what I said and offer a correction: Most universities are nothing more than leftist churches. I can also offer some corollaries. All universities that offer women studies are leftist churches by force of circumstance. If a university has only one course, Economics, and that one course does not preach Keynesianism, then that would be an example of a university that is not a leftist church. So, thanks for helping me make my point more precise.
> this is why Report buttons exist: for when someone starts claiming that Wikipedia (founded by an ardent Libertarian) is "state-sanctioned"
So report buttons exist for when a leftist has no answer to an argument? We should rename that the Leftist button, then.
You're still focused on definitions and intentions.
"The founder of Wikipedia is libertarian, therefore it is preposterous to suggest they have a leftist bias".
Why not simply judge Wikipedia by what it is now in the present moment and the actions its constituents take and what articles specifically they choose to censor and what articles they choose to make prominent? How about judging it based on what bits of History they choose to put in the main article and what uncomfortable bits they relegate to the archived talk pages where they can act like their Academic counterparts and censor and insult those that disagree with them?
Why are leftists so incapable of judging people, groups, ideologies, tools, by their actions, and not what the label says? You just did that so you should be able to give me an answer. Why do you think that the political inclinations of the person that founded a community will necessarily persist? Do you not see that the very United States is counter-example to that silly idea of yours? Have enlightenment ideals persisted throughout the American community just because its founders were Enlightenment philosophers?
> this is why Report buttons exist: for when someone starts claiming that (...) "there's no political difference between Hitler and Obama"
So report buttons exist for when someone makes a principled statement focused on one aspect of the issue? We should call that the "No generalizations" button, while being careful to ignore the self-contradiction and resulting paradox.
I believe the argument I made was more complete and so it doesn't lend itself as easily to comedy fodder for your jokes. I said that there's no political difference between Hitler and Obama when it comes to their stance on legalized violence interfering in the market. You did not refut...
Is it suddently OK to say such things? Denigrating country native population because they don't agree with you?
Native brits survived for thousand years so perhaps they can do so now without you worrying.
(Not a brit, but in my country this ugly tool gets applied all the time)
LOL
Ever heard of colonies?
Throw in a couple of plagues and failed crops as salt in the wounds and that's a wrap.
The massive influx of bouillon and spoils from the Americas were the only thing that kept up the facade for any length of time. Spain's problems were entirely domestic.
At least according to the history books I've read.
This is caused by influx of gold from colonies as far as my understanding goes.
Only in reference to white people.
It's a way of lending Narrative to the purely economic nature of mass immigration -- we're expected to believe that it's about bringing in "innovators", or "hard-working people just looking for a chance", or "people who want to make a better life for themselves". In reality mass immigration is entirely about business and elites undercutting wages and replacing the local population with a cheaper one. It's the same for farm owners hiring illegals as it is for Mark Zuckerberg lobbying for more H1Bs.
There's a finite demand for farm work. But when SV succeeds in creating a new Google using H1B labor, it benefits whole country and also creates more jobs, even for native population.
And it does that from time to time.
No such thing as a native.
In the UK we will see a big spike in racism because instead of persuading people racism is wrong they simply suppressed it. Big mistake.
"For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'" -- David Cameron
He's saying "I've had enough tolerating law-abiding citizens that disagree with Leftism". You know what comes after that.
The other way to interpret that is to think "oh wow, this internet person thinks that the UK is about to turn into something exactly like the USSR".
Which one do you think applies? Don't answer me, I don't care, answer yourself and ask what does that say about you.
You combine that with natural ethnic affiliations and social connections and you have a smart and powerful minority. Honestly, it's the same phenomenon as my Irish family had 40 years ago in municipal government. We had cops, firemen, tradesmen. If something needed to be done, you asked my grandfather and it happened. The difference is that those relatives had great high school educations (through the catholic church) in blue collar-ish jobs, while the Indian phenomenon is high end engineering.
The locals are not willing to work at salary levels the Biharis are willing to work..
If you live in the UK land prices have detached from wages. Really my only motivation for working hard in the UK was to gain the qualifications to emigrate.
The UK has big problems due to a collapsing economy propped up by land prices which it is using to print money. This then has knock-on consequences such as social tensions.
Land value tax now please, and no income tax.
I think the newspapers in the UK have done a great job of exploiting everyone's grievances with house prices.
Some countries actually dream of having house price increases, I might want to point that out. It is a way to create wealth and increase standards of living very effectively.
>Print money
This phrase seems to imply they literally print money and everyone seems to pile on. Surely you know at the end of QE they will be removing the money from the system in the same way they added it in. QE ended in the UK ages ago.
Your last point amazes me. QE won't be unwound. Secondly when banks loan on land they create the money and this increases M4.
2/3rds of bank lending in the UK is against property.
Of course, I can't attest to where the banks lend their money if a large proportion of customers take mortgages it speaks for itself. I merely point out this is not an issue that is exclusively a UK problem.
The UK is one of the worst offenders. Without house prices more than trebling in nominal terms since 1997 much of UK "growth" would not be there.
Right now Cameron is post-queen's speech fluffing up right2buy which is basically an attempt to get more mortgages to get more cash as the UK stalls once again.
I've lived in a place where they struggle to get land prices going up and it's awful. It's way better to have the problem the UK has than to have it going down. Even the support infrastructure (police, etc) deteriorates to the point you get disgusted with crime. My car's side mirror gets stolen and even the police wouldn't care about it even If I have to buy it back from them.
In the UK its mostly surrounding London, there are parts of the UK where land is affordable.
I'm quite familiar with the UK's schemes including right-to-buy. Probably not a good idea since its just guaranteeing a portion of the deposit. Makes people buy what they can't afford.. (subprime?)
I might want to point out the UK is doing quite well alongside a great number of western nations (even though they're cutting their budget). I'm not politically inclined to Tories but this fact can't be distorted.
The answer is not to pump land prices by stopping the banks ramping them.
The UK is not doing well. If you look at flawed indicators like GDP, 10% of which is made up of imputed rent, then yes you will be fooled.
"Facts" can be distorted, in particular GDP.
The parts of the UK that are affordable are not affordable as the wages there are far lower. The loan to value in many places is bad and only tenable due to ultra-low rates which the UK is now boxed into.
Really I disagree with every single line.
I remember being a bit shocked by one of my school mates (on of the Ugandan Asians expelled by Amin) saying that he could understand voting for the BNP.
I just find the whole concept of nationality bizarre.
Then let go of it and call it what it is - cages for the tax cattle.
1: http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecac...
Might be the same thing with Filipinos?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_seamen
This is not a news to me. India lacks opportunities for skilled people. Even with very few opportunities the competition here is fierce. For eg, to get into IIM or IIT (equivalents of Harvard or MIT in US), you need more then just knowledge to get selected amongst hundreds of thousands.
Even after studies the competition is fierce. The Indian middle class dream continues to pursue job as a career and very few take entrepreneurship as a career.
This is untrue. They all have competitive examinations that are open to anyone. There is affirmative action after admission which is the only non-merit part of it. Generally in India, there is age discrimination when it comes to enrolling in schools. There are age limits. Of course examinations are not indicative of actual potential but then we need a quantifiable way to select students. I am also Indian and have participated in these examinations. Also, I never thought IIMs/IITs are Harvard/MIT. Year over year rankings of universities around the world indicate they are nowhere closer. So let's get real there as well.
>>The Indian middle class dream continues to pursue job as a career and very few take entrepreneurship as a career.
Same like middle class everywhere in the world. Failure is the norm in entrepreneurship, success is an exception. If some one's parents slogged their whole just to get their kids decent education, and all the kids did in return is blow up their their working years experimenting, I don't think the kid has respect for what their parents did.
Contrary to whatever you might think, there are as much opportunities in the US, as they are in India. It all depends on how far you are ready to go. In the US, Indians who are even on short term visits work for dog hours, do the same in India. The result should hardly be different.
Now if they could just learn to properly speak English. I know that sounds like something an asshole says, but it's really an issue that should not be overlooked just because someone has been trained to be politically correct and for some reason accept poor language skills by one group of people, yet not from another. Would you be ok with a black person that speaks "ebonics" but is otherwise equally competent?
In reality it is a significant issue because you frequently simply cannot understand those of Indian descent unless they have been in the USA for at least a generation. It's not really limited to Indians, it also and ever more frequently applies to Chinese, but they are not the subject of this article. There are whole departments in tech companies that are staffed with essentially nothing but Indians who speak various Indian languages among each other and have such strong dialects when speaking English that it is almost impossible to understand them. There is even explicit discrimination going on in those kinds of companies that prevents someone like a "real American", a person who speaks English to a satisfactory and comprehensible degree from being hired. Are you going to work with a whole department of Indians that speak a foreign language to each other and actively ostracize you? Are you even going to get an interview as a Duane, Chad, Becky, Omar, Mercedes, Juliana, Marcos, etc.?
This rise of the "burgeoning new elite" is just another symptom of the corporate and elite sell out of America. Indians were allowed to immigrate to the USA through various visa programs in order to quickly bolster corporate tech capacity on the cheap due to the ramifications of incompetent investments in education and insufficient support for engaging our poor and under-educated people. Essentially, America's corporate overlords took the easy route and sold out Americans by kicking the can down the road. What they did was the equivalent of taking out car title and pay day loans in order to fund their lavish lifestyles of exploitation.
What should become more and more apparent to people, although I don't see any real signs of it happening or grabbing hold, is that America is nothing but a big feeding frenzy by the wealthy and powerful. There really is no sense of culture and society worth mentioning. As upsetting as that notion is, what we consider American and defining of our culture is really just all expression corporate interests and exploitation.
What people don't quite get about America, even the 99%ers of Americans, is that although the economy is of course not a zero sum game, it is a limited game that can be represented by the ever popular pie, but where the pie represents a ratio of wealth and income. Or, another way of putting it, you can think of it as an ever replenishing pie. Do you have your mental model and visualization in place? Ok, let me explain.
The thing about America is that there is a defined barrier, a gated community, if you will, between the 1% and 99% and that barrier has been erected in such a manner that 99% of the ever replenishing parts of the pie go to the 1%, or simply that the 1% get 99% of the pie and the rest of the 99% have to share a single sliver of 100 pieces that the pie is cut into. The problem with immigration, whether illegal laborers or H1B, is that they are all dumped into the same pool of 99% that have to share that one single tiny sliver of pie of the 100 pieces that the pie has been cut into, which makes getting ahead or increasing income next to impossible.
Sure there are outliers and exceptions, and I am sure that the "success" of these "burgeoning new elite" would be cited as counter arguments, but the rule simply is that und...
You mean British English?
> There are whole departments in tech companies that are staffed with essentially nothing but Indians who speak various Indian languages among each other and have such strong dialects when speaking English that it is almost impossible to understand them.
Every country has an accent - US, Australia, Germany or France - each one of them have their own accent.
My housekeeper, a US citizen born in Mexico (her father was American), speaks English marginally at best (she had a high school education in Mexico). But she has put two kids through the Palo Alto schools (with another graduating next year); the oldest has a graduate degree and works overseas. She lives in Palo Alto and owns another house in the foothills. She votes, and politicians who want her vote speak to her (via TV) in Spanish. Companies who want to sell her things advertise in Spanish. Isn't that capitalism at its best?
Now I think she's made a poor choice, because I think it's self-disenfranchising to not speak English. But that's her choice to make and it's hard to argue with her success. Plus she's a citizen and it appears quite reasonable to me that my taxes pay for the government to accommodate the linguistic wishes of large blocks of citizens.
(Submitted title was "Indians “extraordinarily successful minority in America”, “burgeoning new elite”".)
While this doesn't fit into the 80 characters HN enforces, and The Economist may have been "editorializing" by using that alternative title, they editorialize by definition and I'm not sure stepping in and changing the title was necessary here.
The surprisingness of The Economist making that statement is what made that widely retweeted and made for interesting discussion here. Or was it the quotes that were "problematic" / offensive?
On HN, the submitter of a story doesn't get to frame it for everybody else. Since the title of a post is the single most important influence on the discussion, this is important.
The whole article is a strong argument for moving the United States' immigration policy in a more merit-based direction, like Canada's or Australia's. Skilled, deliberately-selected immigrants are great, but giving out permanent residence to the winners of a lottery is ridiculous.
Like some HNers here advocate for the US, India restricts foreign ownership of things like land, companies etc. (Personally I think it hurts India but that's another discussion.)
So if someone leaves India and becomes a citizen of another country they lose those rights. A couple of decades ago the government figured out this was a problem, so now Indian-born noncitizens and some decedents of Indian citizens get some ability to travel, invest etc as if they were locals -- even better in some cases because they can repatriate earnings).
As a kid in South East Asia I saw how Chinese family-based affinity networks contributed to the well being, wealth and general prosperity of Cantonese immigrants (my mother, an Indian childhood emigrant who grew up speaking chinese, was weirdly tied in which is how I saw these).
India's emigrants for whatever reason didn't have the same kind of informal structure, but cleverly the government formalized the mechanism which is actually more powerful. Let's see if they can really make use of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-resident_Indian_and_person_...
You are wrong about this.
I was brought up in precisely such a culture in Africa and see it everywhere that Indians migrate to in reasonable numbers.