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12/ That’s why they form ethnic enclaves with weirdly narrow versions of their origin cultures. There is a reason “Indian” food in the US is mostly Punjabi food. Or why half the Uber drivers in Seattle are Ethiopian or Somalian.
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13/ My point with this thread is not to provide any specific commentary on the border crap going on now but to point out that the “order keeping out chaos” mental model of ethnonationalism is really really toxic and sociological nonsense.
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14/ With climate change pressure this sort of thing is going to get far worse, not better. So if we don’t upgrade our mental models of migration, we risk destroying vast amounts of cultural capital trying to preserve itself.
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15/ All the varied cuisines you can enjoy in any major city are just the tip of the iceberg of what gets saved/preserved/redundantly replicated through migration. This is planetary scale distributed computation on an unreliable hard drive.
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16/ I think most countries in the world have some understanding of this: that for thousands of years the world has been based on a system of interdependent cultural capital insurance against local disruptions that relies on migration calculus
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17/ I suspect American-born natives don’t get the enormous value of this system because they’ve so far enjoyed a history bereft of outbound migration memories/narratives. It’s only inbound Ellis island stuff which makes them feel benevolent.
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18/ The 2 domestic migration stories most Americans know — Underground Railroad and Grapes of Wrath — just don’t convey the significance and richness of population movements in human history. Americans have never had to*leave* America in large numbers.
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19/ To me this means this is not a nation of immigrants. It is a nation that is built on remembering only the “gracious host” side of one half of immigration: arrivals. The US has NO sense of departures.
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Americans are one of the only citizens in the world that have to pay extra territorial tax. This badly disincents every departure since every American expat has to pay US taxes no matter where they live outside the USA. This effectively makes every US expat double taxed.
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Canadians are found everywhere. English are found everywhere. Ditto French. None pay taxes if they live outside their home countries. Americans are double paying every day. Over time this is a huge disincentive to permanently living abroad.
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