Joniversity | Immigration and Multiculturalism - Mark Krikorian @Joniversity | Uploaded March 2011 | Updated October 2024, 1 hour ago.
Excerpts from: 'Uncommon Knowledge - Immigration with Mark Krikorian'
Full video here: youtube.com/watch?v=zRgUL4Xz68Y
In the video Mark Krikorian explains why mass immigration is fundamentally incompatible with a modern society. How multiculturalism, modern technology, globalization and more has stagnated and prevented assimilation of immigrant population into their host cultures and thus unbalanced social cohesion. Mark Krikorian also goes into the economic issues and debunks some myths about immigration's donation to the economy and growth.
Here's part of what he says, taken from the transcript of the video:
What's not changed is the immigrants. What's changed is us. Because a century ago, or two centuries ago, the people who came here from abroad were actually very similar to those coming here today. They're coming from rural areas, small towns, from countries that were not very developed, and they're the same kinds of people in a sense. They're usually not the poorest of the poor, they're one step up from that, people with a little get up and go. Because it's a big deal even today to you know, leave your country and go somewhere else.
What's changed though is us. Modernity, over the past century has effected changes
that are so fundamental that our entire situation has changed. First of all, we live in a post-industrial knowledge-based economy. We now have a welfare state, not even just a welfare state, but a large government sector in all respects. The government now spends a third or more of national income. Schools, roads, everything as well as welfare and such [inaudible]. Communications and transportation technology has shrunk the world, which again is a good thing in a lot of ways, clearly, but makes the equation for assimilation and for security very different from anything in the past. Likewise in modern societies the elites lose a lot of the cultural self confidence necessary that we saw a hundred years ago, that successfully got immigrants to become more like us rather than us like them. And so the point is we've basically outgrown immigration, in a whole variety of ways, and it's something that worked for us before, and it just doesn't work now.
The simplistic idea of more people is always resulting in more prosperity is wrong, and that's essentially what they're saying. But they're also shooting down a straw man, saying that there's a no growth kind of anti-human element that you know, if you want to limit immigration, that's somehow bad. The fact is immigration is a government program that we need to shape in such a way as that it serves the interest of the United States. When you're taking in, into a modern society like ours, a post-industrial society, nineteenth century immigrants into a twenty first century society, it just doesn't work very well. Now it's not that they're not gonna be able to eat. Obviously, immigrants come here to work, and they do get work, they also increase the size of the economy, there's no question about it. Immigrants create more economic output, but they almost, they have a bigger piece of the pie, they eat the whole bigger piece of the pie
There is a net, a very small net economic benefit caused by immigration. What happens is immigrants push down the wages of lower skilled Americans, and that economic benefit is then spread across the other 90% of society. Essentially, the poor see a 5% drop in their income, everybody else sees a two tenths of a percent increase in their income, their effective earnings. So it's kind of a moral question. Is it right to beggar the poor for the benefit of everybody else? It's a redistributionistic...
And it goes on...
Excerpts from: 'Uncommon Knowledge - Immigration with Mark Krikorian'
Full video here: youtube.com/watch?v=zRgUL4Xz68Y
In the video Mark Krikorian explains why mass immigration is fundamentally incompatible with a modern society. How multiculturalism, modern technology, globalization and more has stagnated and prevented assimilation of immigrant population into their host cultures and thus unbalanced social cohesion. Mark Krikorian also goes into the economic issues and debunks some myths about immigration's donation to the economy and growth.
Here's part of what he says, taken from the transcript of the video:
What's not changed is the immigrants. What's changed is us. Because a century ago, or two centuries ago, the people who came here from abroad were actually very similar to those coming here today. They're coming from rural areas, small towns, from countries that were not very developed, and they're the same kinds of people in a sense. They're usually not the poorest of the poor, they're one step up from that, people with a little get up and go. Because it's a big deal even today to you know, leave your country and go somewhere else.
What's changed though is us. Modernity, over the past century has effected changes
that are so fundamental that our entire situation has changed. First of all, we live in a post-industrial knowledge-based economy. We now have a welfare state, not even just a welfare state, but a large government sector in all respects. The government now spends a third or more of national income. Schools, roads, everything as well as welfare and such [inaudible]. Communications and transportation technology has shrunk the world, which again is a good thing in a lot of ways, clearly, but makes the equation for assimilation and for security very different from anything in the past. Likewise in modern societies the elites lose a lot of the cultural self confidence necessary that we saw a hundred years ago, that successfully got immigrants to become more like us rather than us like them. And so the point is we've basically outgrown immigration, in a whole variety of ways, and it's something that worked for us before, and it just doesn't work now.
The simplistic idea of more people is always resulting in more prosperity is wrong, and that's essentially what they're saying. But they're also shooting down a straw man, saying that there's a no growth kind of anti-human element that you know, if you want to limit immigration, that's somehow bad. The fact is immigration is a government program that we need to shape in such a way as that it serves the interest of the United States. When you're taking in, into a modern society like ours, a post-industrial society, nineteenth century immigrants into a twenty first century society, it just doesn't work very well. Now it's not that they're not gonna be able to eat. Obviously, immigrants come here to work, and they do get work, they also increase the size of the economy, there's no question about it. Immigrants create more economic output, but they almost, they have a bigger piece of the pie, they eat the whole bigger piece of the pie
There is a net, a very small net economic benefit caused by immigration. What happens is immigrants push down the wages of lower skilled Americans, and that economic benefit is then spread across the other 90% of society. Essentially, the poor see a 5% drop in their income, everybody else sees a two tenths of a percent increase in their income, their effective earnings. So it's kind of a moral question. Is it right to beggar the poor for the benefit of everybody else? It's a redistributionistic...
And it goes on...
