Politics and immigration

Um, cherry-picked immigration where countries compete to attract the smartest, most talented people around the world is really good.

`4:28:30`

Merit-based is key here because there's actually virtually no illegal immigration in most of Europe. Southern Europe has some illegal immigration, but most of Europe does not have a big problem with illegal immigration. And the problem is with mass immigration of other kinds, and that you end up with demographics that are just totally different from what they were even a few short decades ago. And I think the countries of Europe would benefit from immigration. In fact, one of the interesting things about the Danes is they carry meticulous statistics on immigration. I'm not entirely sure why they're so detailed. Maybe it's all the way back to Mogens Glistrup and his discussion in the '90s, but they do. And what's clear from those statistics is that when the Danes have folks from the UK, France, the US show up, on average, those immigrants are really beneficial to the Danish state. They contribute far more than what they ask of the state. So the Danes should accept immigrants who do that, who contribute far more than they take. Then you look at other forms of immigrant groups. There was just a tally that came out last week from a Danish politician that had asked the, I think finance ministry to do this tally with the latest numbers. What does it cost the Danish state to have positive immigration? This case as I mentioned.

I think for the, On that list whatever, France, UK, US, they were all clustered around the same thing, about $25,000 net benefit to the Danish state every year. It's like, wow, that's very positive. That's average again, right? And then at the other end of the spectrum on the most costly immigrants was Somalis. They ended up costing the Danish state on average $28,000 a year. I think it's fair for the Danes to go like, "We'd prefer to get more French, Brits, and Americans and not so many Somalis."

`4:30:47`

That's a very taboo topic in a lot of circles.

`4:30:56`

I'm sure, but I also think-- I mean, I wanna take the steel man argument here. I do think that it, this can turn ugly, right? Is it possible for some of these things to just veer into overt racism that isn't founded in anything else but a hatred of other people? Yeah, that could happen. But that risk does not negate the need to have a discussion about the makeup of your country and what your immigration policy should be like. And I-- what I also find so funny is, especially in Europe, it's so kind of myopic that this discussion about whether Europeans should have a right to self- determination about what their countries look like, that standard seems to only apply there. No one is trying to tell the Japanese, "Hey, you, you're too Japanese." Like whatever, it's 98%, I think, in Tokyo that's, um--... Ethnic Japanese, right? Like, is anyone trying to tell the Japanese that their Tokyo would be a much better country if, if they were down to London levels of ethnic Japanese, that it was, whatever, 37%? I don't think so. So there's this weird almost self-loathing, in my opinion, I mean uh, Gad calls it suicidal empathy--... that permeates this stuff to a degree that I still haven't fully unpacked. Like, where is this coming from? Why is it that way? But regardless, I just noticed, hey, London looks different. I preferred the old London, as I would say I preferred the neighborhood that I grew up in in Copenhagen, how it looked in the '80s.

Like I-- I totally get how you can then jump five leaps and go like, "Okay, well-" That's racist. And I also, I don't care anymore. Like, this is a fair discussion to have. Countries and peoples have a right to set an immigration policy, and this notion that we shouldn't have any borders or, or even worse than that, it's all just a blank slate, that all peoples are just the same, and we can take people from one place of the earth and we can place them in another place on the earth and everything's just gonna work out hunky-dory. Empirically not true. Europe has been running that experiment since the '80s. It hasn't panned out well, and now there are forces in Europe who wanna undo that experiment, who want to end mass immigration as it's been run so far. And I happen to believe, and so do a majority of Danes and a bunch of other peoples that like, "Do you know what? Yeah, it hasn't been working how we've been doing it. We gotta make some changes." And I don't think that means, again, zero immigration. Again, I'm an immigrant. I think US, generally speaking, has benefited tremendously from immigration, but that's the kind of sleight of hand. Immigration depends greatly on who immigrates. And a country benefits when the people who immigrate are net contributors to the society, and in most cases, that they assimilate with the local culture.