CIO Fox guest: "Great blessing" that old Americans can't afford to retire

[darklordoftech]

Horrible. This is why I fully understand why some Americans are attracted to the ideas of AOC and Bernie. But their blind spot is multiculturalism. Their open borders fantasy will always enable capitalism to foster.

The combination of capitalism and multiculturalism really leads to the worst possible outcome for the general populace, especially those in worse socio-economic positions.

Are you legitimately trying to claim that multiculturalism has an actual tangible negative effect on national economics and the lower class?

I've seen arguments like this regarding illegal immigration, but multiculturalisn? This is a massive crock of sh__.

Multiculturalism causes social cohesion to decline and individualism to increase. The result: less willingness to pay into a system that upholds a welfare state. Moreover, mass immigration of working-class people drives down wages (and slows down automation and innovation). The main losers of such policies are the native working classes (of whichever color). Middle-class people lose too, as they benefit from a welfare state and good public facilities (also thinking of education here) too as well as being affected by the decrease of public safety. The only ones who benefit are the literal 1%.

Somewhat interestingly, off topic or not, but I have been reading a book ("l'archipel français" to be precise), by Jerôme Fourquet - which included a load of analyis about the experience of North African migrants in France. And what stood out is that they were following a broadly "normal" pattern of integration (increasingly likely to marry out of their community, increasingly likely to choose "french" rather than "muslim" names for their children, increasingly likely to benefit from social mobility and move out of the banlieues...) until this process actually started going backwards around about the year 2000. Ie, more or less the time that neo-liberal "there is no alternative" capitalism was becoming hegemonic across the globe.

In fact, in many societies, you actually have this ultra-liberalism coming into place before they became multicultural (eg Thatcher was elected at a time when the UK was still 98% white); which I think undermines the argument that Multiculturalism is something that undermines social cohesion.

So I would tend to think that the cause of social fracturing and individualism was not multiculturalism - but instead, it was purely down to neoliberalism, which drove both everything you described about social cohesion, but as a consequence, drove the failure of integration of recent migrants (and that includes the rise of the Islamist identatarian movement, which was also clearly fuelled by neoliberal globalisation as much as anything else). I mean, I wouldn't dispute that "neoliberlism" has been a driver of increased migration to Europe, but I think you have the causality the wrong way round.

You say something changed “around the year 2000”. Didn’t 9/11 happen around the year 2000? 9/11 resulted in governments harassing people who looked middle-eastern and wars that displaced people from the Middle East.