The death of meritocracy

For a couple of decades, the standard neocon response to immigration, clearly seen for example in a derivative thinker like Tamar Jacoby, is that mass immigration would be all hunky-dory if it weren't for those evil leftist intellectuals who seduce innocent immigrants into identity politics.

Now, the amusing paradox is that nobody believes in the neocon prescription for treating immigrants more than the the French. They hate identity politics, affirmative action, multiculturalism, and all the rest almost as much as the neocons hate the French.

Well, it turns out that you can follow all the neocon rules and still have immigrant groups rioting in the streets. The truth is that the quantity and quality of the immigrants matter more than the details of how you treat them.

Of course, the French won't be allowed to think about effective solutions for their problem. What all the bright boys are telling them, including some of the neocons, is that they need to impose affirmative action quotas on themselves. And Sarkozy is all for it.

So, what happened? Well, the ethnic groups that are supplying the rioters have much lower average IQs than the French average. When you get growing groups with different average IQs in the same country, you will eventually have overwhelming demands for affirmative action. That is a lot of politics.

If you don't want to have affirmative action, then don't have ethnic diversity of average IQ. That's the only solution.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer