Again, I think it is unfair to complain about others who supposedly fail to understand you, if you yourself aren’t making an effort to understand those who disagree.

I’m not necessarily claiming “multiculturalism” is a threat.

I’m not disagreeing that there are homegrown threats.

But two things can be true: There is a concerning rise of xenophobia in the form of Stephen Miller, JD Vance, and friends… and also, the Indian subcontinent has a history of handling multiculturalism worse than almost any other place on Earth, if you look at the caste system, the India/Pakistan relationship etc. And if you scroll on X, there are good reasons to believe that they are importing this dysfunctional, zero-sum approach to group differences (“izzat”) into the United States.

We can vote Stephen Miller and JD Vance out of office. But revoking citizenship once it’s granted is much harder, and arguably a line that should not be crossed. Granting citizenship is arguably a more serious decision, and should be done with greater care, than electing a politician. I don’t want to make citizens out of people who will proceed to taunt us and say “I can’t believe you were so stupid as to give me citizenship”. Is that so hard to understand? That’s not an immigration policy which will lead to a functional and harmonious society.

It would be pretty surprising if whatever is going on with Miller and Vance is exclusive to the United States. It also would be remarkable if it was stronger here in the US than anywhere else! Humans exhibit similar tendencies across the globe, which means that ethnic narcissism, xenophobia, etc. can be found in many countries. My claim is that they are found at a higher density among Indians cheating the H1B system than they are found in the US mainstream. So if we import Indians who get here by cheating the H1B system, then we are increasing our country’s density of such ideologies on net.

“Multiculturalism” can’t just mean self-hatred. For “multiculturalism” to be a sustainable and functional ideology, it has to mean opposing bigotry in all its forms. Immigrants can be bigoted too! For “multiculturalism” to be a coherent ideology, it will oppose immigration when the immigrants are more bigoted than the natives. If “multiculturalism” means welcoming immigrants, even when the immigrants disdain and defraud the native population, voters will correctly recognize that “multiculturalism” is more about committing civilizational suicide than fighting bigotry.

I don’t think Trump as a single data point proves much. And by third world standards, I don’t believe he is especially interesting or remarkable as a leader. Corrupt populism is very common in the third world. Trump is only interesting because he got elected in the US. By Latin American standards he’s a fairly toothless caudillo. We should hold on and hope for a regression to the mean, instead of declaring defeat and indulging these tendencies.

Take a look at the Economist Democracy Index which attempts to rank the quality of democracies worldwide based on somewhat objective criteria: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T…

You can see the US still ranks as a “flawed democracy”, that is to say, despite all of the Trump hullabaloo, we are still ranked #34 out of 167. Things could get much worse, and we should not take our current relatively high rank for granted.

In summary, my point is that Democrats should make cracking down on H1B fraud part of their party platform, possibly phrased in labor-rights terms to avoid stirring things up excessively.