Immigration is Importing Poverty

The big lie about immigration is that it is “good for the economy” and “necessary to maintain the social security structure”. Because in any advanced economy, immigrants reduce the productivity of labor and impose a tremendous financial burden on the economy that significantly outweigh any benefits they could ever collectively provide.

New data shows that foreigners account for a substantial share of people living in absolute poverty in Italy, even as the poverty rates of families with two Italian parents drops. One director of La Verita newspaper, Maurizio Belpietro, has run an opinion piece in his newspaper lamenting that Italy is “importing poverty.”

“We are importing poor people. Of the total immigrant population, 35.6 percent live in absolute poverty. This rate is five times higher than that of Italians,” writes Belpietro, who is an influential voice in Italian politics with 360,000 followers on X.

He further notes that although foreigners make up a small percentage of the population, they represent a huge share of the number of people living in poverty.

“Of the 2.2 million households living in poverty, i.e., do not have enough income to support a minimum standard of living, 1.5 million are Italian and 733,000 are foreigners. This means that, despite being less than a tenth of the population, poor non-EU citizens are one third of the total,” he wrote. The data, from the Italian government’s Istat, shows that for those families with one Italian and one foreign parent, the absolute poverty rate is only slightly lower, at 30.4 percent.

Claims that mass immigration would “save” European pension systems are increasingly running into reality.

Citing the article, Italian commentator Francesca Totolo wrote on X: “No, immigrants do not pay pensions to Italians. The absolute poverty rate among families of only foreigners is 35.2%, while among families of only Italians it is 6.2%. This means that it is and will be Italians who have to pay for assistance, subsidies, housing, and pensions to foreigners without resources.”

This finding has been replicated in many other countries, which shows that the left’s promise that foreigners would feed into the pension system falters when confronted with the data. Notably, there are substantial differences between EU and non-EU foreigners, with EU foreigners often boosting GDP and contributing to the tax base, in particular those from certain EU countries.

According to a landmark study from the Netherlands, the report found that migrants had cost the state €400 billion between 1995 and 2019. In Germany, the estimated cost of migrants is currently at €50 billion a year, including social benefits, housing, integration, education, and child allowances.

In 2021, French author and academic Jean-Paul Gourévitch said in an interview with Radio Sud that employment data show that it is a myth that immigration to France has economic benefits.

“I have studied this topic extensively and today everyone in France, from the left to the right agrees that immigration costs more than it brings in,” Gourévitch said. “There is a major difference between left and right (oriented) economists regarding the costs: the leftist economists say the deficit is six to ten billion [euros per year], while those on the right say it is 40 to 44 billion. My own scientific research shows that the deficit is 20 to 25 billion [euros],” he said.

There is absolutely no positive economic argument for permitting mass immigration except for the appeal to debt-funded GDP growth that could be much less expensively provided by simply having the government distribute more spending money directly to the native population to boost consumer spending.

Mass immigration is an economic disaster as well as a societal disaster. There are only three solutions: mass repatriations, mass violence and ethnic cleansings, and total societal collapse. And no amount of magic-wording, word-spelling, and name-calling is going to create a viable fourth option.

The mass importation of foreigners is almost unprecedented in history. And extreme policies such as we have suffered will inevitably result in extreme consequences.

Consider that Great Britain has been invaded by 10x more foreigners than have invaded Ukraine. How can anyone expect the consequences for Great Britain to be less significant over time than the consequences of defeat for Ukraine? A military invasion is often less significant over time, because in the case of a military invasion, most of the foreigners eventually return home.

DISCUSS ON SG

We Are Not Conservatives

Andrew Torba has really been on fire lately. And he says it much better than I ever have:

Let us be clear so there is no confusion and no room for misinterpretation: we are not conservatives.

That word has become a mark of surrender, a synonym for the managed decline of a nation we refuse to abandon. Our allegiance is not to a decaying set of liberal principles, to a faltering democracy that serves global interests, to “lower taxes” or to a “rules-based international order” that has bled our people dry. We will not conserve the hollowed-out institutions of a dying empire.

Our allegiance is sworn to something real, something eternal: to our God, our people, and our homeland. It is the soil beneath our feet, the blood in our veins, and the spirit that calls us to greatness.

We have no interest in conserving a political system mired in bipartisan decay, where two heads of the same beast promise change and deliver only ruin. We will not perpetuate a cycle of foreign wars and endless aid to distant nations while our own communities crumble into dust and despair. We refuse to uphold an economic order that leaves our own citizens struggling, indentured to a global market that despises our traditions, our faith, and our very existence.

Our mission is to build something new. Not a fragile imitation of the past, but an order of strength, clarity, and purpose, dedicated first, last, and always to the national interest. We don’t want to turn back the clock. We want to forge a future worthy of our nation’s legacy.

For over a century now the liberal and conservative establishment have captained this ship. They inherited a vessel of unmatched power and prestige, and with a toxic blend of incompetence, arrogance, and malice, they steered it directly into an iceberg of globalism, demographic decline, and cultural erosion. The steel of the ship groans, the ice grinds against the hull, and still, they toast their success in the captain’s lounge, blind to the icy water rising around their ankles.

We are done begging for a seat at their table.

Those who stand for the Good, the Beautiful, and the True are not conservatives. We cannot be conservatives, because conservatives defend nothing, conservatives conserve nothing, and conservatives stand for nothing.

Conservatives are the rear guard of the godless, globalist, satanic Left. The only function that conservatives serve is their gatekeeping function, and attempting to plant themselves at the head of the parade in order to subvert it and redirect it to harmless directions.

As has been observed many times before, a conservative is simply a liberal of 20 years ago and a progressive radical of 40 years ago. Whereas the things the true Right stands for are either material – blood, land, family, and gold – or timeless – God, Jesus Christ, nation, and truth.

We are not conservatives. We have never been conservatives. And we will never be conservatives.

UPDATE: An apt summary of conservatism on SG:

  1. Posture
  2. Compromise
  3. Surrender
  4. Retreat
  5. Whine
  6. Repeat

UPDATE: A cogent observation about how conservatives are not even our allies, as they are all too happy to join forces with the likes of Stalin and the literal grandchildren of the Trotskyites now known as the neocons.

The same conservatives saying things like “I’ll never ally with THOSE people on the Right” will also claim it was a moral imperative for America to ally with literally Joseph Stalin himself in World War II. They’re not above the Friend/Enemy distinction. They just have different enemies than you do.

DISCUSS ON SG

Rediscovering Van Creveld

But there is more to social justice and social justice convergence than simple feminization:

Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the Great Feminization thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminization’s effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.

The most relevant differences are not about individuals but about groups. In my experience, individuals are unique and you come across outliers who defy stereotypes every day, but groups of men and women display consistent differences. Which makes sense, if you think about it statistically. A random woman might be taller than a random man, but a group of ten random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of ten men. The larger the group of people, the more likely it is to conform to statistical averages.

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies…

he Great Feminization is truly unprecedented. Other civilizations have given women the vote, granted them property rights, or let them inherit the thrones of empires. No civilization in human history has ever experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses. Even where women do not hold the top spots, women set the tone in these organizations, such that a male CEO must operate within the limits set by his human resources VP. We assume that these institutions will continue to function under these completely novel circumstances. But what are our grounds for that assumption?

The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?

If the Great Feminization poses a threat to civilization, the question becomes whether there is anything we can do about it. The answer depends on why you think it occurred in the first place.

The author is entirely correct to be concerned about the consequences for every industry in which women become the majority, because all of those industries will cease to be able to perform their primary functions. We’ve already seen that, for example, in elementary education, where predominantly female teachers working under female principles and female-majority schoolboards cannot teach schoolchildren how to read, write, or do arithmetic.

As we are observing in real time, female-dominated politics are not compatible with civilization because women have different priorities and perspectives than those required for its construction and maintenance. A feminist society, if left unchecked to its own devices, will look very similar to the average African society before European contact. The episode of Survivor in which the two tribes were divided by the sexes is a very vivid example of this.

But the author is confusing the symptom for the disease. Women are more akin to the vector of the disease than the disease itself, as can be observed from the way in which men who are social justice warriors are every bit as incompetent and even more insane than the women are. The disease is ultimately spiritual and eventually ends in either societal collapse, pyramids dedicated to child sacrifice, or both.

The good news is that a) converged societies will inevitably fail, b) women’s commitment to feminism and social justice will vanish as soon as the government funding fails, and c) men stop supporting female influence over them.

This is a unique moment of history, and it is already observably coming to an end.

The lesson, as always, is this: women ruin everything.
—Bill Simmons

DISCUSS ON SG

On Facing Age

Even after a man’s fifty or sixty, he can still know happiness, even do useful work.
—Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi

As a man moving from middle age into old age, that’s certainly good to know. Personally, I’m hoping for eight more years of soccer and at least 23 more years of active writing. AI has been a real godsend with regards to the latter.

And apparently, I’m just hitting the peak of my mental powers now. So I should be able to produce one or two more original thoughts in the next few years.

Scientists in Australia say that overall mental functioning in the brain actually peaks between the ages of 55 and 60. People in this age range may be at their best for complex problem–solving tasks and high–ranking leadership roles in the workforce.

DISCUSS ON SG

Leave the Dead Where They Lie

Andrew Torba writes eloquently on the necessity of building new platforms and moving away from the dying old mainstream ones:

Let me start by being perfectly clear: you are not going to infiltrate the system and magically take over legacy institutions. This isn’t some Mission Impossible movie or Fight Club, it’s real life. Anyone who genuinely believes this is possible has clearly never set foot inside a real legacy institution. I am talking about the corporate boardrooms, the government agencies, the universities, and the mainstream media conglomerates. These are not blank slates or neutral grounds. They are highly sophisticated systems engineered over generations with one primary purpose: to perpetuate themselves and eliminate any threat to their established dogma.

These institutions possess a powerful immune system. It is a literal set of defensive mechanisms designed to identify and expel dissident thought. They have endless bureaucratic procedures that can bury any reform effort in red tape. They have human resources departments that function as ideological compliance units, enforcing a secular progressive creed. They have anonymous reporting hotlines that encourage coworkers to snitch on each other for wrongthink. There are layers upon layers of protection designed specifically to prevent what some would naively call a dissident coup.

If you enter one of these institutions, you face a binary choice with no middle ground. You will conform, or you will be annihilated. You will slowly, inevitably, become the very thing you claim to oppose. You will be pressured to attend mandatory training seminars that label your Christian faith as hate speech. You will be forced to sign loyalty oaths to ideologies that dismantle the natural family and deny biological reality. You will be expected to celebrate degeneracy and mock tradition. If you refuse to comply, you will be ostracized, investigated, and finally ejected. Your career will be terminated and your name will be blacklisted across the entire industry. This is not a theory. This is the lived experience of millions of our people who tried to make a stand from within.

Just look at these institutions themselves. Do we really want to encourage young people to spend the next thirty years living a lie so they can magically “capture” them at some distant point in the future? They are rotting husks. Hollowed out cathedrals of a dead century. They operate on pure inertia and a deep, desperate fear. They are managed by cowardly souls who long ago traded their convictions for a steady paycheck and a vague sense of prestige. They believe in nothing but their own self preservation. They can smell your dissent, your faith, your love for your people, and they will react like a body rejecting a transplanted organ.

The idea that you can simply lay low for thirty years, hide your true beliefs, and slowly rise through the ranks to take over this dying establishment is not a strategy. It is a fantasy. It is a voluntary life sentence in a spiritual prison. It is a plan to waste your one precious life chained to a corpse.

He’s absolutely right. Look how much effort, and how many tears, were wasted on Wikipedia and the biases of its 500 admins. If everyone who cried about Wikipedia’s falsehoods and slanders had simply become an editor on Infogalactic and edited the article they were crying about, Infogalactic would have far surpassed Wikipedia by now.

Because they are subversive by nature, SJWs are keenly sensitive to interlopers and heretics who have not entirely succumbed to convergence. They will never, ever, permit anyone who is not entirely infested by the mind-virus to come anywhere close to positions of power or influence, unlike naive conservatives who couldn’t wait to vote for a black man for president and get a little spring in their step when they can preen about the new female pastor at their church.

No one seeks their enemies’ approval and scorns their friends like a conservative.

In keeping with this theme of new platforms, I’m very pleased to be able to say that Arktoons will not only be continuing, but will even be undergoing a renovation of sorts, as we have a new dev taking responsibility for the maintainance and development of the platform who is already very experienced with it and is fully in sync with the needs of the creators.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Special Interview

This is a real treat! Big Serge interviews Dr. Sean McMeekin, the author of the excellent book STALIN’S WAR:

Big Serge: “One of the first things that stands out about your work is that you have found success writing about topics which are very familiar to people and have a large extant corpus of writing. World War One, the Russian Revolution, World War Two, and now a broad survey of Communism – these are all subjects with no shortage of literature, and yet you have consistently managed to write books that feel refreshing and new. In a sense, your books help “reset” how people understand these events, so for example Stalin’s War was very popular and was not perceived as just another World War Two book. Would you say that this is your explicit objective when you write, and more generally, how do you approach the challenge of writing about familiar subjects?”

Dr. McMeekin: “Yes, I think that is an important goal when I write. I have often been called a revisionist, and it is not usually meant as a compliment, but I don’t particularly mind the label. I have never understood the idea that a historian’s job is simply to reinforce or regurgitate, in slightly different form, our existing knowledge of major events. If there is nothing new to say, why write a book?

Of course, it is not easy to say something genuinely new about events such as the First World War, the Russian Revolution, or World War Two. The scholar in me would like to think that I have been able to do so owing to my discovery of new materials, especially in Russian and other archives less well-trodden by western historians until recently, and that is certainly part of it. But I think it is more important that I come to this material – and older material, too – with new questions, and often surprisingly obvious ones.

For example, in The Russian Origins of the First World War, I simply took up Fritz Fischer’s challenge, which for some reason had been forgotten after “Fischerites” (most of them less than careful readers of Fischer, apparently) took over the field. In the original 1961 edition of Griff nach der Weltmacht (Germany’s “Bid” or “Grab” for World Power, a title translated more blandly but descriptively into English as Germany’s Aims in the First World War), Fischer pointed out that he was able to subject German war aims to withering scrutiny because basically every German file (not destroyed in the wars) had been declassified and opened to historians owing to Germany’s abject defeat in 1945 – while pointing out that, if the secret French, British, and Russian files on 1914 were ever opened, a historian could do the same thing for one of the Entente Powers. I had already done a Fischer-esque history on German WWI strategy, especially Germany’s use of pan-Islam (The Berlin-Baghdad Express), inspired by a similar epigraph in an old edition of John Buchan’s wartime thriller Greenmantle – Buchan predicted that a historian would come along one day to tell the story “with ample documents,” joking that when this happened he would retire and “fall to reading Miss Austen in a hermitage.” So it was a logical progression to ask, if Fischer can do this for Germany’s war aims, why not Russia?

Both the interview and the book are highly recommended.

DISCUSS ON SG

Asymmetric Economic Warfare

Despite being more vulnerable to trade war pain due to its export surplus, China has adroitly managed to gain the upper hand in the economic conflict by taking advantage of the fact that semiconductors require input factors that are almost entirely under Chinese control.

Despite the show of progress and professed optimism for a potential de-escalation in the Madrid trade talks, the US wasted no time to launch a series of trade and tech sanctions against China immediately afterwards, just like it launched the sneak attack on Iran shortly after its 5th round nuclear talks with Tehran.

  • The US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) tightened its chip ban on China, expanding the embargo to cover all semiconductor related software and equipment sales to China, in an effort to completely choke off China’s ability for chip production
  • Washington expanded its entity list (i.e. black list) to deny high end sales to businesses outside of China that have 50% or more Chinese ownership
  • It announced a plan to charge million-dollar port fees for any Chinese-operated shipping companies, Chinese-made ships, or non-Chinese shippers with Chinese-made ships in their fleet or on their order books, in an effort to undermine China’s shipping building industry
  • Washington also put a 721% tariff on Chinese clean energy products such as solar panels
  • It imposed 50% tariff on semi-finished copper products and copper-intensive goods (e.g., wiring, batteries) under Section 232, targeting China’s dominance in EV/tech supply chains
  • It ended de minimis exemption for low-value packages, hitting e-commerce from Chinese platforms such as Temu and Shein

Faced with the bad faith from the Trump regime, China retaliated swiftly with a suite of counter actions:

  • Beijing published its latest restrictions on rare earth products to deny any sales of China-sourced rare earth magnets, processing technology, and equipment to foreign military and semi-conductor industry
  • It revoked import license for US lumber and soybeans. China was the biggest buyer of US soybeans in the past and accounted for over 50% its export. But it has ordered no purchase in 2025
  • Beijing announced it would charge reciprocal port fees for any US-operated or US-owned shipping companies. China runs 7 out of the world’s top ten container ports and has by far the highest port calls. Though the US builds few ships and few large shipping companies are US operated, US pension funds and asset managers own large shares in some of the world’s top shipping companies like Maersk which are now subject to the port fees. This move directly targets US financial interests
  • China also tightened up export of lithium ion and graphite anode, critical for green transformation
  • It expanded the unreliable list (China’s answer to the entity list) to cover more US defense contractors, tech firms, and critical mineral companies. It also launched anti-trust investigation against Qualcomm, a large US chip manufacturer

The latest tit for tats strongly indicates China is ready to move up the escalation ladder in its confrontation with the US on trade and technology issues.

In particular, Beijing’s enhanced rare earth restrictions are expected to deal a massive blow to high tech and military production in the US and its vassals.

In its embargo of chip technology against China, the US utilized the Foreign Direct Product Rule (FDPR) to block chip export to China if non-US made chips use any American technology, software, or equipment somewhere along the supply chain.

In essence, the FDPR allows US to claim jurisdiction to any products US technology touches even if it is made overseas such as the case with TSMC and ASML. The rule gives the US extraterritorial reach.

With the new rare earth restrictions, China flips the logic back to the US. Beijing has announced any non-Chinese companies operating anywhere must obtain Beijing’s approval to export rare earth magnets or semiconductors if those products contain Chinese original rare earth, or if they are produced using Chinese rare earth technology, process or equipment.

Beijing is denying all rare earth products, technology, equipment, and technical support to foreign end users it doesn’t approve.

The Chinese economic strategists understand that in an economic war, pain flows downstream. The US thought it was in the driver’s seat – and indeed, I assumed much the same due to the fact that the US economy would benefit greatly from refraining from importing goods from China and onshoring its now-absent industrial manufacturing capabilities.

But the stranglehold China has upon the materials required for modern warmaking materials, particularly drones and semiconductors, means that the USA will have to choose between its ability to make war and its ability to maintain the global Clown World economy. And for the first time, it is not possible for Uncle Sam to choose guns and butter.

DISCUSS ON SG