From Melting Pot to Demographic Weapon: How Elites Turned Immigration Into a Tool of National Suicide

“There’s no way you can explain your whole nuanced stance on immigration in one graph!” (A gatopal who was goading me into doing this)

Challenge accepted.

(And I do so love graphs)

Ready? Here we go.

I started with this graph from William Meijer, which shows the distribution of “Western psychology” among various peoples.

The core takeaways here are:

• There are many more non-Westerners than Westerners.
• Both groups have a considerable variance around a mean with regard to their underlying psychology/values.
• Portions of these curves overlap.

I find “Western psychology” to be a little tricky to pin down, so I altered that axis to “Western cultural values” because I think this same relationship holds for that variable and it’s more germane to the discussion.

From this idea, you can look at the graph above and say, “Oh, OK, I can see which potential immigrants might do well/fit into/benefit the West.” But area under curve (AUC) is notably difficult to eyeball. Based on this graph (which admittedly is not based in data, just a generalized idea), what percentage of potential immigrants from the non-West wind up being a clear benefit to the West?

Take a guess.

Hint: The answer is almost certainly lower than you suspect.

We’ll get there in a minute.

First, here’s how I broke this down based some core underlying assumptions:

• There is such a thing as “Western cultural values,” and these values (like social contract, rights based republics, primacy of individual rights/liberty above the state, and high-trust golden rule based interaction) exist in varying degrees in various people. They cluster in the West, but can also be found elsewhere.
• These values have objective value and create flourishing, free societies.
• Values incompatible or antithetical to them harm those societies and diminish their flourishing, freedom, safety, and prosperity. Past a point, they break them.
• The West flourishes because it is mostly made up of groups of people who all habitually choose not to defect in the iterative prisoners dillema of “all living together while respecting one another’s rights and not going ‘smash and grab.’”
• That’s the social contract, and it works. The systems and institutions within it can govern lightly and effectively because the people are generally cooperating with this idea and those who don’t are few enough and far enough between to be managed and dealt with with high liberty, high trust systems.

This takes us to my answer to the “nuanced immigration in one graph” challenge.

Voila!

Here’s how I plotted that:

D: This part of the non-Western curve has no overlap with Western values. As such, this group is non-integratable and incompatible/antithetical. Thus, “harmful” to the West.

C: This part of the non-Western curve overlaps the bottom 10% of Western society, a group that is, itself, generally the source of most problems in the West. We have plenty of that already, thanks. Thus, “almost certainly harmful.”

B: This group overlaps the 11th to 50th percentiles in the West. Such people may be able to assimilate, many fit in, and might make it on their own. We could argue it should really be 20th to 50th and thus smaller, but I wanted to extend maximum benefit of doubt. Thus, “possible” (but not necessarily beneficial as they are still all below the mean and drag the average down, but by the right end of that group, you’re probably getting some good people)

A: This group has stronger Western values than the average Westerner and provides the most benefit. You get some friction in schools and language, acclimation, etc., but in general, these folks are highly additive and great to have around bringing new food, ideas, talent, and generally wanting to get with a program that they already like and bringing the newed vigor of the new people who really, deeply appreciate what they have because they have seen first hand what lacking it is like. They are unshakable in their commitments and often raise the game of those around them. I could probably have called this “beneficial” and been correct, I just erred on the side of waffly to sidestep the “but muh corner case!” objection.

So that’s the framework, and it’s simple once you see it and realize that, based on that graph, “beneficial” is only 2% of the rest of the world (I used graphics software to measure AUC)

Sure, the graph itself is arbitrary and not rooted in any precision, but I would wager that that number is within spitting distance of being correct in a global context and that the intuition that “2–3% of the non-Western world holds Western values more strongly than the average Westerner and that likely 3–4% would have any decent shot at useful assimilation based on values and capability. (Keep in mind it’s a lot harder to go assimilate than it is to work it out where you were born)

Now here’s the tricky bit:

It’s group A that got us into much of the current trouble.

It’s because they ARE great folks.

This led to a classic sort of bias error: Wow, these immigrants are great! We’re an immigrant nation! The immigrants are more American than the Americans! And in many, even most cases, this was true.

I taked about this at some length HERE.

But one cannot generalize from that any more than one can from “well, the average immigrant from India earns more than the average American.” Indeed they do, but these are the cream of India, the 1–2%, and that average among the 1–2% is about the 75th percentile here. That’s a great outcome, and having them is likely a boon in many ways, but if you go scoop up the 50th percentile from India or most other places, the experience and values alignment is likely to be very different.

And we see this.

Immigration on the US once ran a “cream filter.” It was hard to come here and harder still to make it. There was little to no safety net, discrimination, and hard times. But many came and thrived and assimilated and become Americans in every meaningful sense. This was the melting pot, the immigration that worked. It may not have always been nice, but the fact that it was hard was the selector that made it work.

But then some bright light said, “Hey, these folks are grand, we should make it easier to come and help them once they get here!”

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