Jared Diamond's immigration thought experiment: Divide the strong and weak | Big Think

Jared Diamond's immigration thought experiment: Divide the strong and weak
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Every American, without exception, is an immigrant. Native Americans immigrated 13,000 years ago, and everybody else has immigrated within the last 400 years.

The decision to emigrate is made by people who are healthy, strong, willing to undertake risks, and face the unknown. Those are also essential qualities for innovating.

It's no coincidence that the great majority of American Nobel Prize winners are either first-generation immigrants or the children of first-generation immigrants.
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JARED DIAMOND:

Jared Diamond, a noted polymath, is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his many awards are the U.S. National Medal of Science, Japan's Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of the international best-selling books Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse; Why Is Sex Fun?; The World Until Yesterday; and The Third Chimpanzee, and is the presenter of TV documentary series based on three of those books.
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TRANSCRIPT:

JARED DIAMOND: Immigration in the United States is a controversial issue just as it is in most other countries of the world. Many other of not just first-world countries, like Japan, Australia, Western Europe are wrestling with immigration, but many developing countries. When I was last in Indonesia, Malaysia, Indonesia's neighbor, is having a problem with Indonesians migrating into Malaysia because the standard of living in Malaysia is higher than in Indonesia. And South Africa, an African country, is having issues with immigration with neighboring poorer African countries such as Zimbabwe sending immigrants into South Africa.

So immigration in the United States the fact is every American without exception, is an immigrant. Native Americans immigrated 13,000 years ago, and everybody else has immigrated within the last 400 years. My father immigrated at the age of 2 in 1904. My mother's parents immigrated around 1890. Most Americans are immigrants. If you look at the contribution of immigrants, if you ask yourself, do a thought experiment: take the citizens of any country in the world out there, take the citizens of Poland or Russia and divide them into two sets. Suppose you had a mechanism for dividing every citizen of Poland into either two categories. One category are those people who are healthy, ambitious, willing to take risks, willing to try new ways, young, strong. And the other category consists of those people who are weak, unwilling to take risks, unwilling to experiment, wanting to carry on in their old ways. In effect, dividing a country into those two groups is what's accomplished by the decision to emigrate. The decision to emigrate is made by people who are healthy, strong, willing to undertake risks, and face the unknown. And those who don't emigrate, on the average, lack those qualities. But willing to take risks and experiment, those are essential qualities for innovating. And the United States is a country of innovation. It's therefore, no surprise that the great majority of American Nobel Prize winners are either first-generation immigrants or the children of first-generation immigrants.

So immigration has made a strong contribution to the history of the United States. But it's controversial because whenever you get a batch of people who are there and then another batch people coming who are different the Vietnamese of the 1970s, etc. they are different and there are likely to be prejudices. There have been prejudices against immigrants throughout American history, beginning with the first non-British immigrants, the Irish and the Germans. And eventually, that settled down. Then the prejudice against the Eastern Europeans, the Japanese and Europeans of the late 1800s, and then the prejudice against the Vietnamese. So it's unsurprising that immigration is an issue in the United States today, but reflect on our history. Students of immigration say that the United States has benefited more from immigration than any other country in the world, and that for the United States, a higher percentage of our immigrants are highly trained, skilled people who contribute to our economy than the immigrants into any other country in the world. Yes, it's a problem for us. But we are better off than any other country with that problem.

[danielswinger]

Wouldn’t you argue that the countries they’re leaving need them more than we do then

[JOONYERful]

“Maybe it’s true that we are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers. If our ancestors had not been that, they would have stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed out soil”
- John Steinbeck, East of Eden

[alphacause]

Immigrants simply are those individuals who are deeply dissatisfied with the circumstances of their homeland, and hence they migrate to seek a better life. Inherent in this mindset is a rapacious compulsion to succeed - a compulsion that a population which has been rooted in a country for generations does not have. In effect, those who have lived in a country for generations grow complacent, and the drive of their forefathers has been eroded. If this driven mentality is such a distinctive trait that we look for in Americans - which is what is claimed by patriots who adore this country - then it stands to reason that immigrants, who exemplify this unrelenting ambition in spades, is far more "American" than those who have been here for several generations, and who have grown lackadaisical as a result.

[flowergrowersmith]

Imagine if countries actually competed for high quality immigrants!

[andycapp]

Japan is ethnically pure. And they are world leaders in innovation.!

[ReluctantReader]

Imagine if those innovators actually worked to better their own nations.

[njits]

It would be a start if we managed to get the unemployment rate under North African communities in my European capital city to a reasonable level - we are talking about third and fourth generation immigrants - before we get overexcited about how a new influx of African or Middle Eastern immigrants will benefit our societies. The Nigerian young men who risk their lives on the Mediterranean might be young and ambitious and definitely willing to take risks, but the harsh truth is we don't need them, no matter how much we sympathize with their desperate situation.

[moondog]

They're not the same psychologically. Openness to Experience is correlated with liberalism, creativity, less conscientiousness. The northwestern European-descended people are still higher in Openness than these non-NW Euros who immigrate into other countries. There was a post on Quora responding to a question about culture shock in Canada, and a responder said he was an Indonesian guy, and that "Liberals are conservatives in Canada"; he wrote that him and his (presumably) white Canadian roommate have the same beliefs, but that his roomate identifies as conservative, yet in Indonesia, he'd be considered a liberal.He said he identifies as liberal because in Indonesia that's what he's considered. Also, Douglas Todd wrote about how hardly any non-whites vote for the Green Party. There are very few vegans who do it for animal compassion reasons who aren't white. Staffan of StaffansPersonalityBlog on WordPress wrote an article about this, titled something like, "How You Can't Make an English Vegetarian" (I don't remember the exact words of the title). A commenter wrote that veganism is just egalitarianism extended to non-human sentient beings. Harper PhD did a self-admittedly unscientific study of who visits and filled out her survey on certain vegan websites, and found that whites were about 10 times more likely to identify as vegan than any other racial self-identification. HBD Chick has also written about how people from outside the borders, which include the Hajnal Line and are pretty much most of northwestern Europe, are much less likely to be high in Openness / W.E.I.R.D.ness.

[kimbo]

People who dont migrate are simply more content. That could be called a virtue. Migrants never stop pining for their homeland. It gnaws at them and causes them grief.There is also much stress and mental illness amongst migrants. Innovative ? Most migrants start small businesses to avoid tax.Then there is enclaving to avoid integration. NOT all equal are we ! So some ethnic groups successfully migrate much better than others.Some ethnic groups are utter failures bringing their third world hell holes with them. If a country wants more people it should produce them itself, rather than stealing them from other needy nations.Mass Migration today is human trafficking done by for-profit human traffickers. A variation on slavery

[theKurtAnderson]

An important distinction to make is the voluntary immigrant (which is what Diamond is talking about in this video) versus the involuntary immigrant (e.g.- refugees). I think his argument falls apart if one doesn't make this distinction.

[RickDelmonico]

We are not getting the best and the brightest, pouring over the border.

[cybersekkin]

There are not just two classes of immigrants. In a modern world there appears to be an uptick in economic immigration. I would never expected such thing to be possible. Problem is how do you discourage the takers and still get in the makers...?

[tyv]

The issue that we're having it's not immigration is illegal immigration what is he talking about?

[jasonunwin]

In 1902 when his father came to America the economic and demographics of the nation were markedly different than they are now. More importantly, there wasn't a social welfare system in those days for immigrants to "bed down in" like there is today.

[StigHelmer]

Taking the best and brightest from other countries hurt those countries. This is a major factor behind African and South American poverty today.

[emmanuelgoldstein]

The thing about immigration is that it’s NOT the key drive to innovation. Nor it is the challenge. It’s the same thing with multiculturalism. Or fire.

The thing that divides people in such topic is the idea that we somehow have to either support or hate it. “Ignoring” was never the option, when in fact it’s actually the wisest choice for everyone.

Why not just stop trying to engineer social and economical dynamics? Let everything flows naturally, without intervention. The only one who has the right to let an immigrant to stay in a property is the property owner. The only one who has the right to let the immigrant work at a company, is the business owner. The only one who’s responsible for the survival of the immigrant is themselves.

[itsmyyoutube]

I have a sneaking suspicion that this is meant to conflate between legal immigrants that take the proper steps to come and embrace a new country and culture and illegal immigration largely a population of people that come for financial benefits.

I'm willing to bet everything that if you did a study on that you would not find the same mindset.

[PetarStamenkovic]

Could you get more PC and less factual. No one is disputing these facts. However, they are not the whole story. In fact, they represent the overwhelming minority of migration. The other part- people from unstructured counties fleeing those countries while preferring their political disorder to emigrate with them is what is the problem.

[donavanblue]

in the past 20 years I have not met a single nobel prize winning immigrant, 20 years ago is when we started seeing them in my town. on the other end of the scale though. this is just a fact of my exp

[Gitohandro]

So Why're the visas sooo damn hard to