I want the Jewish state to be as Jewish as possible. I want Jews to be more than 90% of Israel’s citizens. I want them determining their own destiny. I want them running their own politics, culture, religion and media. I don’t want them displaced and ruled over by high IQ aliens.
So I then extend this thinking to other groups and it helps me to respect their desire to maintain their cohesion and strength.
This is a good anti-immigration argument that you see nowadays in those gray areas of online commentary that attempt to straddle that fine line that delineates barely acceptable from unacceptable discourse in respectable society.
@JayMan471 I'd just put an IQ floor on immigration of about 125 IQ.
— Randall Parker (@futurepundit) September 9, 2015
Of course, very conveniently, very few Syrians – let alone Sub-Saharan Africans – would qualify, as pointed out by Steve Sailer and psychometricians like James Thompson and Heiner Rindermann.
It’s an argument I bought into myself for quite a few years. But I’m not really sure I do so nowadays. Here are a few reasons.
(1) Regression to the mean. This is the least important reason. It only happens once, and if the immigrants in question are at >125 IQs, their progeny are virtually guaranteed to continue to be well above average in the future (if not to as great an extent).
(2) Cognitive colonialism. Scouring the Third World of its already very limited stock of high IQ people will very seriously hamper their already dim development prospects. Sure, this will not have any discernible effect if you’re talking about China. 7% of the Chinese population, or ~100 million people of its 1350 million people, has a >125 IQ assuming a 103 average and S.D. = 15. But the equivalent figure for Syria, with its 81 average IQ, is 0.2%, or a mere 40,000 or so of its 20 million population. These tail effects will be all the more extreme for ~70 IQ Sub-Saharan Africans, of whom only 0.1% would qualify. Strip those societies of the cognitive elites they need to institute good policies that would make those countries more prosperous and habitable – and incidentally, less likely to generate massive refugee waves in the first place – and you end up creating only fairly marginal additional benefits to the already cognitively gifted First World. One could call this cognitive colonialism.
(3) Cultural bell curves. Societies can also differ cardinally from each other in terms of cultural values even if they have otherwise equal IQ levels. For instance, translated onto an IQ-like scale, there is possibly a greater than 1 S.D. difference between the Greeks and the Germans in terms of their future time orientation. Even though they have achieved similar levels of economic output per capita (since that depends very largely just on IQ), these differences in national time orientations arguably underlie much of the Eurozone’s economic dysfunction. The differences between Europeans and Arabs, or Europeans and Africans, will likely be all the more profound and not just in terms of time horizons but also in propensities towards violent crime, ethnocentrism, and other cultural factors too subtle to measure or potentially even define.
(4) Ethnic capture. This is at the very border between edgy and taboo, between the academese of Amy Chua’s “market dominant minorities,” the quasi-academese of Kevin MacDonald’s (and W.D. Hamilton’s) “ethnic genetic interests,” and the decidedly non-academese of “Zionist Occupation Government” propounded by members of a certain weather related forum. But it’s worth mentioning at least in passing. The theory goes that certain ethnic groups, because of their above average levels of guile, intelligence, ethnic solidarity, and/or some combination thereof, can in effect “seize” or at least substantially influence their host country’s policies – and not always to the benefit of the indigenous population. Even if they are not successful at that they can still, by virtue of their cognitive elite status – and in the US, at least, policy always hews to the preferences of the cognitive elites, while the proles have to follow along – conceivably shift society’s mores and values in a direction deeply at odds with the wishes and desires of the indigenous population. In short, why risk even testing this theory out, if you don’t absolutely have to?
So overall that’s a pretty solid case if I do say so myself. More importantly, it covers pretty much all ideological bases. The first argument is just elementary biology. The second is progressive and anti-imperialist. The third is primarily cultural and should appeal somewhat to mainstream conservatives. The fourth I suspect is for people who let’s just say probably don’t need much convincing in the first place.
