Commenters Rohan Swee and Dave Pinsen kick around the current mindset:
"I, too, have long been perplexed by these questions. A "nation of immigrants" should be mostly immigrants, no?"
It's time to take it to the next level then, and make America truly a nation of immigrants. For starters, everyone born here would have to leave. Then they would be replaced with immigrants. And when the immigrants wanted to have kids, they would have to leave the country and start their families elsewhere, lest their kids be born here and miss out on the magic of immigrating here.
So America would be a place where people came, worked for a few years, then moved on. Sort of like one of those extended stay business hotels. The United States of Extended Stay America.
Sounds like a plan!
There's a lot of money to be made off of constant churn. These days, the question that's in the forefront of everbody's thoughts and prayers is: "Is it good for the billionaires?" Anybody who isn't worried about the welfare of our precious billionairely resources is A) Not currently a billionaire himself, B) Obviously, never going to be a billionaire, and therefore C) A loser.
My favorite book of 2011 was Homesickness: An American History by Susan J. Matt. This academic gypsy historian, who finally earned tenure at the third college she was employed by, draws an insightful distinction between homesickness, which was indulged during the 19th Century but is derided these days because it's too particularist to make much money off of (you're homesick for Palmdale the way it was in 1981, when it seemed like everybody's dad was an aerospace engineer? Sorry, can't do much for you), versus nostalgia (you liked the Go-Gos when you were growing up Palmdale in 1981? Well, that's why we licensed "We've Got the Beat" for Target's Back-to-School-Days ads!)
There was actually a mini-scandal in Canada when author Yann Martel called it the "greatest hotel on earth". You only have to stay on Canadian soil for 3 years out of 5 to get citizenship, and people literally count the days.
ReplyDeletePart of the fun of being a hotel is you have a bunch of Canadian citizens living in Lebanon who pay no tax yet demanded free tickets out when it was being bombed by Israel. Also great that people can work in Hong Kong or Shanghai and then come back to Canada for the free health care when they're old and decrepit.
If being a 'nation of immigrants' is so great, then we have a simple solution for ending Third World poverty. Turn them into nation of immigrants. Have 10 million Ugandans immigrate to South Africa, have 10 million South Africa immigrate to Tanzania, and have 10 million Tanzanians immigrate to Congo and have 10 million Congolese immigrate to Sudan and etc.
ReplyDeleteBy such wonders of immigration, Africa shall no longer know hunger again and be the equal of the US.
How to fix Ireland and Greece's woes. Turn them into nation of immigrants. Have half of Ireland immigrate to Greece and have of Greece immigrate to Ireland.
ReplyDeleteBoth will be nation of immigrants, and the problem will have been fixed.
Steve, its more than just Billionaires. One of the massive things wrong with America and the West, is the growth of the aristocracy. Which is defined not by money but by power over other (White Middle/Working class) people.
ReplyDeleteWe had plenty of billionaires, with more absolute wealth and comparitive wealth in the Gilded Age than now. And their power was decisively curbed by the Progressives. John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, all made Gates and Zuckerberg look like pipsqueaks.
What is wrong is that about 30% or so of Whites are effectively an aristocracy. Not one of titles, Downtown Abbey, "stately Wayne Manor" and the like. But assistant undersecretary for Alternate Thursdays, and the like. The staffers, assistants, minor executives, of the NGO-istans, Bureaucracy, and the like that make rules and arbitrate power over ordinary people. Including obscure local, state, and federal agencies concerned with recycling, the "environment" and the like.
All of these are united in a remarkably coherent, stable (you're wrong saying they are shaky -- they've held together in mutual loathing of Middle/Working class White guys for almost 70 years) coalition designed to third-worldize the West.
Zuck with his fellow Billionaires would be as long term successful as Rockefeller. But Zuck with thirty percent (at least) of Whites in a defacto aristocracy based on bureaucratic domination of government and government allied organizations desperate to preserve stability -- yes yes yes (to quote Daniel Brian of the WWE).
White guys are an existential threat. They keep coming up with disruptive technology that threatens to upend the permanent managerial ruling class of Huntington and Francis, particularly nerdy Middle/Working class White guys. No one wants another disrupter like say, Philo T. Farnsworth, or the Wright Brothers, or Samuel Colt, or Nicola Tesla. So drown them with the third world. And keep the aristocracy in power.
Which is why the coalition is so stable. They are all fellow aristocrats. Aristos always stick together against commoners. Always.
now you are starting to come around to my point of view: virtually everything that comes into the public view in america, that makes it to the top in the mass of competing interests, etc, has something to do with spending money. If it does not somehow relate to americans spending money, it is nothing.
ReplyDeleteIt's like there is a filter imposing on ideas, things, etc that acts as a natural selection filter. If there is no side effect of spending money, it gets filtered out 99% of the time. Disasters and the like excepted, of course....
It takes a Potemkin Village.
ReplyDeletetell us your favorite book of every year.
ReplyDelete"everyone born here would have to leave. Then they would be replaced with immigrants."
ReplyDeleteExcellent plan. Here's my implementation:
Part the first:
All third-world population to move to USA, supervised by the UN. All, no exceptions. America becomes an exponential-GDP economists-utopia with a population of billions of ad-revenue generators. NY-LA greater metropolitan area. World GDP doubles. Trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk. Third world poverty ended. Sally Struthers retires.
Part the second:
The non-vibrant portion of USA is banished to the now-vacated lands. The ultimate liberal-revenge fantasy. Now they can experience first-hand the misery they inflicted on those people by not allowing them to immigrate here.
They can see first-hand life with the civil-wars, the gang-rapes, child-prostitution, drug-cartels, brutal dictatorships, AIDs. They will see what effect an accident of birth can have on your life. O Fortuna velut luna statu variabilis.
Then we will build a wall around USA so that they can never come back. They will try to climb the wall and beg for permission to immigrate, but their pleas will fall on deaf ears. See how it feels, hah. (Also, no one can leave either.)
The low population density will really make for a miserable GDP. It will be like living in a world-wide Australia, shudder.
I'm torn as to whether infrastructure left behind should be left intact or sabotaged. Immigrants are so industrious they won't need it.
Forget about immigrants. Native born whites cant seem to stay put in one place.This leads to an utter lack of continuity,community and tradtion.
ReplyDeleteHow many of the previous presidential candidates were really tied to their "home state"
Obama was a Senator in Illinois but grew up all over the country(Hawaii,Kansas,NY) and the world.
Mitt Romney is from Michigan,no Utah, no Massacussetss,no
GWB , are you a Yankee or Texan -make up your goddamn mind
McCain- Virgina,Maryland,Florida,DC. He came to Arizona rather late in life
True populism is regional.It would demand that Obama would have to do his undergrad at U Chicago or UIL Urbana Champain or better yet Illinois State(we are talking abut populism after all)rather than Columbia.
High school and Undergrad is key ,that is when your loyalties are forged
Having read Bill Bryson's book on his road trip across America, I felt a sort of sadness at the loss of unique cultures and communities. Coarse materialism,modernization and large scale population movement propelled by careerism and cheap ,fast transport uprooted a good deal of tradition
I think most people react favorably to the quirks of Coen brother characters be they the sing song Minnesota folk, the peculiar Arizonans,tough Texans or antebellum style Missisippi not just for a sense of what they yearn but a longing what they have lost.
These days it seems that a sense of community is a mainstay of the elite
"Forget about immigrants." - No, immigration is actually a fairly big issue here.
ReplyDeleteI feel "stay" is too static, almost obstructionist. A vibrant nation of immigrants ought to be on the move. So, it's a good start, but it needs a little twerking. Make that a lot.
ReplyDeletethink I returned because I know that my parents left to give us a better education, and while I was there, I felt that all of that effort was for naught if I worked as a florist, caring for someone’s baby or working at a butcher shop” 27-year-old Maru Ponce said. She immigrated to New York when she was 8 years old. Now she works in the Mexican capital as a sales operation analyst for a company and dreams of doing graduate studies in the same area.
ReplyDeleteIn general, undocumented immigrants in the United States cannot get a driver’s license or credit cards, and cannot travel freely in the country.
This the Brenda Walker Article on Vdare, if the Amnesty get defeared and the 400,000 that return liked going home then there might be more of a trend.