The Schools Aren’t Magic

Immigrants are proving literally uneducable(PDF) by the schools in the countries they have invaded:

In spite of the many criticisms to which PISA can and should be legitimately subjected, it is difficult to deny that this large and highly successful OECD project is a blessing for research in Comparative Education, as it provides strictly comparable data on inputs, processes and results for most educational systems in the world. The outcomes of analyzing these enormous data sets are rather disappointing for those who had expected from it quick and solid adjudications among rival theories. First the PISA reports, and then the many reanalyses carried out on the PISA data, have found only very weak relations between students’ outcomes and characteristics of educational systems which are usually thought of
paramount importance (Carabaña, 2008).

It is from these tenuous links that multilevel regressions extract cross-country coefficients that, when statistically significant, are quite hard to interpret even by the best willed officials and scholars. I will here address the question of the effects that schools in the destination countries have on the academic results of immigrant’s children. Immigration countries have generally better schools and better results than countries of emigration. It is therefore easy to imagine how the desire to improve the schooling conditions of their children might be one important pulling factor for emigrants. However, against all expectations of subjects and observers, immigrant students score in the PISA tests rather like students in their countries of origin than like native students in the countries of destination.

In spite of the allegedly better schools of the host countries, the learning of the newcomers remains at the level of their origin countries not only in the first generation, but also in the second and even later on.

This is because the differences across humanity are not merely “skin-deep”. The contents of one’s character do matter, but so too do the contents of one’s culture, and even more importantly, one’s genes. An 80-IQ Somali immigrant who attends a good public school in Minneapolis is still going to be an 80-IQ Somali after being given a piece of paper that declares he is educated. So too will his son, and his grandson, and his great-grandson.

This should be entirely obvious, as the British colonists did not gradually turn into American Indians after four generations in the New World. And the descendants of the African slaves imported into the Americas are still observably distinct in appearance, behavior, and educational outcome after many generations of education in the USA.

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Recalculate

Karl Denninger works out that at most 14.5 percent of illegal immigrants “work and pay taxes”.

Ok, 2 million people have been removed.

These are all (or mostly; nothing is ever “all”) productive working people just trying to make an honest living, right? That’s the line run by people who are against deporting those here illegally.

Really? Is that true?

Let’s ignore January because Trump didn’t take office until the 20th, and nothing really happened until February.

February 2025, Employed: 162.544 million
August 2025, Employed: 163.288 million

Hmmm…. 744,000 more people working in August of this year than in February.

Now let’s look at 2024, when Biden was in office and before this operation began, same months.

February 2024, Employed: 160.315 million
August 2024, Employed: 161.348 million

Hmmm…. 1,033,000 more people working in August than in February in…. 2024.

So….. 289,000 more people went to work from February to August of 2024 when illegal aliens were flooding the country than in the last seven months.

In other words of the 2 million illegal immigrants that have been expelled by one means or another it is a reasonable argument that a mere 14.5% of them, or about one in seven, were working in a form and fashion that was recorded in the household survey, which is a clean survey of people, not of employers who are paying everyone above the table on W2s. I’ve been following said survey since the 1990s privately and reporting on it monthly since 2007.

The rest of those who have been removed or self-deported were being showered with the proceeds of armed robbery committed by local, state and federal governments against everyone else here in the United States, including you and I, or they were living on outright criminal activity that is not counted as employment at all.

Oh, and beyond that 14.5% they were not paying any employment or income taxes either so spare me that tripe as well.

All of the economics-based pro-immigration arguments assume a much, much higher percentage of working and tax-paying immigrants than is actually the case, which, of course, is why the net drain on total economic resources is inevitably much higher than the pro-immigration “it’s good for the economy” idiots anticipate.

Even without the relevant statistics, it’s very, very easy to observer how deleterious mass immigration, legal or illegal, is for an economy, as all one has to do is look at the economic history of the USA post-1965, and the economic history of the UK and the European countries post-2010, to see how opening the borders to less-intelligent, less-productive peoples lowers the wage rate, reduces overall societal wealth, increases state spending, enlarges state debt, and shrinks the economy in real per-capita/debt terms.

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What a Difference 10 Years Makes

When people ask “how can you believe that women shouldn’t have the right to vote,” I don’t equivocate, retreat, or attempt to qualify my position on the subject. I simply ask them how it is possible for them to believe, with more than 100 years of evidence available, that extending the franchise to women has improved any society in any way anywhere on the planet.

In a reasonable and rational world, men and women would agree that some fundamental assumptions were incorrect, some very serious mistakes were made, and men would protect women by not permitting them any direct involvement in macro-level societal decisions. But this is not that world. We live in an irrational, unreasonable, and stupid one.

So, most women will have to protect themselves from the inevitable consequences of their personal decisions and political preferences. That should prove to be an interesting challenge. One certainly wonders what point they’ll have reached in another ten years.

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Mailvox: The World We Lost

Request to the GenX crowd — what is your best anecdote or memory or description of “how things used to be”? The before time, that we millennials and younger have no memory of.

The entire suburban 20-house neighborhood of 20-30 children between the ages of 5-11 playing outside, all day, every Saturday during the school year and every weekday too during the summers. My favorite was the huge Capture the Flag games the older kids would organize sometimes in the evenings after dinner. We’d play until it got too dark to be able to see very well, then everyone would go home.

In the summer, the people with the big house and the pool would put out a red flag on Saturdays to announce an open pool after lunch and half the kids on the street would play there all afternoon. In the winter, the open rink about a mile away would be one big pick-up hockey game and my parents would just leave me there after lunch and pick me up before it got dark. Usually some moms would show up with cookies and hot Russian tea in the warming hut.

The freedom and sense of community was entirely different than today. Many of the neighborhoods look more or less the same from the outside, but since the mid-1990s, one no longer sees large packs of kids playing outside together like they previously did.

And if you want conclusive evidence that immigrants to America will never, ever, understand the world of the 1950s-1980s that we lost, consider the perspective of one immigrant from Portugal who still doesn’t know what we’re talking about despite having spent most of her adult life in the USA.

Well, excuse me, I lived in a village growing up. And while I miss some things, sometimes, if you think for a little very Odd kid it was an ideal environment, you’re out of your ever loving mind. In fact, it wasn’t an ideal environment for anyone, judging by the epic fights and factions. Because people in point of fact had very little in common, and were together by utter necessity, which means that the group enforced absolute conformity and you couldn’t escape.

Whoever said anything about poor rural villages full of inbred Iberian peasants? That was never our world and it certainly isn’t the loss that we’re lamenting. These days of diversity and immigration are most certainly not “the good new days” in the eyes of any genuine American.

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“Destroying Your Heritage”

President Trump calls out the European countries that foolishly embraced open borders and third-world migration at the behest of Clown World.

US President Donald Trump has warned that open border policies and “suicidal energy ideas” will be “the death of Western Europe,” insisting that something must be done immediately to reverse course.

“This cannot be sustained,” Trump told the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, calling the crisis of uncontrolled migration “the number one political issue of our time.”

Your countries are being ruined,” he said, accusing the UN of funding an “assault on Western countries and their borders,” citing the $372 million spent by the organization in 2024 on supporting an estimated 624,000 people migrating to the US.

He went on to claim that Europe is in “serious trouble” and has been “invaded” by an unprecedented “force of illegal aliens” that is “pouring” into the continent. He criticized European leaders for failing to do anything about it due to political correctness. Trump pointed to London and its “terrible mayor,” Sadiq Khan, claiming that the city has changed beyond recognition and is moving toward Sharia law.

“What makes the world so beautiful is that each country is unique. But to stay this way, every sovereign nation must have the right to control their own borders and to limit the sheer number of migrants entering their countries,” he said.

He stressed that while the US remains compassionate to people who have truly struggled in their home countries, it is important to “solve problems in their countries, not create new ones in our countries” by importing people from different cultural and religious backgrounds who break the law and make false asylum claims.

“You’re doing it because you want to be nice,” Trump said, addressing his European counterparts. “You want to be politically correct, and you’re destroying your heritage,” he claimed, calling for an end to “the failed experiment of open borders.”

Of course, the fact that he turned around and declared Ukraine could still win a war it has already lost tends to render his pronouncements a little less credible, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s correct about a) the failure of the open borders experiments and b) mass remigration being the number one political issue of our time now.

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Conservatives Reject the Proposition Nation

It’s more than a little late, but conservatives are finally beginning to shake off the absurd idea that America is not an actual nation of people, but an idea:

It the recent NatCon conference in Washington, D.C., Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri delivered a powerful speech about American identity, arguing that our nation isn’t merely an abstract proposition about human equality and rights, but a distinct people with a shared past and a common future.

“For decades, the mainstream consensus on the Left and the Right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an ‘idea’ — a vehicle for global liberalism,” Schmitt said. “We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors. The true meaning of America, they said, was liberalism, multiculturalism, and endless immigration.”

Not so, argued Schmitt. America’s principles, he said, are not abstractions. “They are living, breathing things — rooted in a people and embodied in a way of life. It’s only in that context that they become real.”

This is absolutely correct. Those who would reduce America to an abstract proposition either misunderstand or misrepresent our history and heritage. As I argued at NatCon last year, nearly everyone who argues that America is a proposition is wrong about what the proposition is and what it means. “All men are created equal” is a specifically Christian claim, not a universal call to multiculturalism and mass immigration. It emerged as a political ideal from Christian Europe, and arrived in America by way of settlers and pioneers who came here specifically to establish a nation where they could practice their Christian faith as they saw fit.

In other words, America isn’t a grab-bag of Enlightenment tropes about free speech and equality, but the product of Christian Europe. The ideals that animated our founders are universal in the same way that the Christian faith is universal: God created all men equal, they all bear the imago Dei, the image of God, and are all His children. But the only people who ever took that self-evident truth and used it as a foundation on which to forge a new nation were the English colonists in America.

The fundamental falsity of the proposition nation can perhaps be most obviously seen in the way that “a nation of immigrants” has subsequently been applied everywhere from England and Sweden to, most recently, Japan, of all places. It’s a psychological operation, not a philosophical truth.

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Collapse by 2050

A leaked Chinese geopolitical strategy document reveals China’s self-confidence. The document predicts, “The US and Western Europe will collapse due to cultural and demographic conflict by 2050.” China’s leaders increasingly see multiculturalism as “cultural suicide” and believe the west is dying because of it.

—CNN

The Chinese aren’t wrong, although my 2004 estimate for the initial breakup of the USA as a unitary political entity is 2033. The EU has already begun to break apart and the centrifugal forces will continue to grow stronger with the failure of its economic war against Russia. The USA, the UK, and every Western European country are either going to collapse into a violent partition like India circa 1947 or embark upon ethnic cleansing on a larger scale than the Israelis are currently applying to Gaza.

Multiculturalism isn’t just cultural suicide, it is societal suicide, which is arguably worse. The Chinese know this; Xi is not only smart, and not only has the benefit of being advised by Wang Hunin and other brilliant historical philosophers, but is also a student of the greatest political mind of the 20th Century, Lee Kwan Yew. So he knows what we all know, and what Clown World refuses to accept, about multiculturalism.

That’s why Russia is now selling 106 billion cubit tons of natural gas to China every year in lieue of the 160 billion cubic tons it used to sell annually to Western Europe. The Russians, too, know who is going to win in the long run.

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Softly, Softly Clucked the Conservative

The media’s house conservatives are now being permitted to wonder if perhaps maybe things were allowed to go just a little too far in ignoring the will of the people:

Preliberal democracy accepts the practice of regular elections but rejects most of the core values of liberalism: free speech and moral tolerance, civil liberties and the rights of the accused, the rule of law and independence of courts, the equality of women and so on. Turkey under the long reign of Recep Tayyip Erdogan typifies this type of democracy, as did Egypt under the short reign of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi.

Postliberal democracy, by contrast, embraces the values of liberalism but tries to insulate itself from the will of the people. The European Union, with its vast architecture of transnational legislation, is one example of postliberalism; international courts, issuing rulings where they have no jurisdiction, are another; global environmental accords, like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement (signed by the Obama administration but never ratified by Congress), are a third.

Standing between these two models is old-fashioned liberal democracy. Its task is to manage the tension, or temper the opposition, between competing imperatives: to accept majority will and protect individual right, to defend a nation’s sovereignty while maintaining a spirit of openness, to preserve its foundational principles while adapting to change. If the frustration of liberal democracy is that it tends to proceed in half-steps, its virtue is that it advances on more secure footing.

That’s the ideal that much of the West essentially abandoned in recent years. On the political left but also the center-right, postliberal policymaking largely determined the outcome of the two most basic political questions: First, who is “us”? And second, who decides for us?

Merkel never sought the approval of German voters to relax the country’s immigration laws and take in nearly a million people over the space of a year. Americans didn’t elect President Joe Biden on any promise to let in millions of migrants over the southern border. Post-Brexit Britons never thought they’d bring in an astounding 4.5 million immigrants to a country of just 69 million between 2021 and 2024 — under Tory leaders, no less.

No wonder the reaction to years of postliberal governance has been a broad turn to its preliberal opposite.

The conservative solution, of course, is not solution.

There’s something partisans of the center-right and center-left could do: Instead of discreetly murmuring that, say, Merkel or Biden got immigration policy wrong or that it was morally and economically right but politically foolish, they can grasp the point that control over borders is a sine qua non of national sovereignty, that mass migration without express legislative consent is politically intolerable, that migrants ought to be expected to accept, not reject, the values of the host country and that hosts should not be expected to adapt themselves to values at odds with a liberal society.

Forget that. The nationalist position is moral, just, and perfectly easy to understand.

You didn’t ask us for permission when you brought them here. We don’t need your permission to send them home.

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Game Theory and Foreign Insourcing

The transformation of Silicon Valley into Mumbai-by-the-Bay was no accident:

Built by Americans. Captured by Foreigners. Post #1 How foreign interests infiltrate, capture, and gut American companies from the inside.

This is no longer a theory. It has happened. And we have the blueprint. In 2023, a U.S. attorney exposed how a company he worked with was quietly taken over after hiring a foreign CEO. The new CEO, backed by a private equity firm, removed the original American founders. Then he filled every C-suite position with executives from his home country. No diversity. No objectivity. Just a complete executive sweep. Within months, 15% of the American workforce was laid off. But the jobs didn’t disappear. They were filled by imported workers on visas. The firm was transformed from the top down, one relationship at a time. “He replaced every executive with someone from his country. Every single one.”

“My sister’s company went through the same thing. She’s the only American left on her team.”

“This is everywhere. And nobody is stopping it.” This is how it begins: leadership capture. One executive opens the door, and the network follows. Soon, referrals dominate hiring. Americans get passed over. Merit takes a backseat to connection and caste. The story was reported in Business Today and LiveMint, and originally shared by a U.S. attorney on X. No company name was shared. That’s the point. This could be your company. Your team. Your job.

In this series, we will break down every phase of the takeover. With citations. With legal records. With receipts. They didn’t just take the job. They took the company. And they’re not done yet.

The concept of a pure meritocracy is inherently and uniquely post-WWII American. No other culture shares it, although the degree to which they ignore merit and are content to simply parasitize and pillage the existing capital and infrastucture varies widely from culture to culture.

It’s a uniquely stupid philosophy, since it is, by definition, a self-terminating one. All it takes, as we’ve learned, is one X to find a position in HR, in the immigration office, or on the board, and a port of entry has been established to bring in more X until enough influence has been brought in to start denying entry to everyone who is Not-X.

It’s a very simple exercise in game theory, and the extent to which the American executive class failed game theory can be seen in the percentage of U.S. CEOs and board members who are not American.

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Diversity Enriches Switzerland

Not even the uber-civilized Magic Dirt of Switzerland is enough to maintain order once a sufficient quantity of societally incompatible non-Europeans have been imported.

Dramatic riots have erupted in a Swiss city after a migrant teen was killed in a scooter crash while fleeing the police. Riot cops clashed with protesters who hurled Molotov cocktails in Lausanne as officials desperately tried to put a lid on escalating violence. The unrest comes with the Olympic capital’s police in the spotlight after four officers were suspended Monday following the unearthing of racist, sexist and discriminatory messages in private WhatsApp groups.

Marvin M, a 17-year-old Swiss resident of Lausanne, was fleeing police on a stolen scooter, hit a wall and died early Sunday, despite resuscitation attempts by emergency services. It was the third death in less than three months in Lausanne during a police intervention. There have been seven such deaths in the city and the wider Vaud region since 2016. Five involved men of African origin.

On Sunday night, ‘around 100 young people, wearing balaclavas’ set fire to several containers and damaged a bus, police said. The following night, 150-200 people set up roadblocks using trash containers, setting them on fire, police said. Some 140 cops clashed with the rioters, who torched buses and pelted them with stones.

Lausanne authorities sought Tuesday to head off a third night of violence in the Swiss city.

The problem is that the solution is a counterintuitive one for the social justice bureaucrats, whose entire philosophy and system of values render them unable to even begin to address the problem, let alone solve it.

Ironically, Lausanne’s best bet is to promote the four suspended officers and put them in charge of establishing and maintaining order, as they are the only authorities who clearly understand the nature of the challenge that has been created by incompatible immigration.

It’s been really fascinating to observe, over the course of two decades, how Europeans have gone from self-righteously preening about “America’s gun problem” to belatedly realizing that America never had a gun problem, America has an African problem that the Europeans have now brought upon themselves.

To quote the great historian Martin van Creveld, “Immigration is war”.

UPDATE: The vibrant youth also attacked a politician from Switzerland’s largest political party.

During that night, a Swiss People’s Party (SVP) politician, Thibault Schaller, was targeted in a lynching attack, which was caught on video. He wrote on X that he approached the unrest because he was curious what was going on. Upon getting closer, some individuals, whom he said he believed to be Antifa, recognized and confronted him.

“They ordered me to leave. I refused and asked what was happening. One pushed me, I pushed him back then stepped back. Someone shouted something, and 10, 15 people came running at me from everywhere. I ran away, took hits. They blocked my path, I fell, protected myself. I got up, ran, got surrounded again against a wall, then took blows. Then, I managed to get away by running. I’m fine, but we really need to take back this city,” Schaller wrote.

As I have previously pointed out, regardless of how one feels about immigrants, refugees, or fuzzy bunnies, there are two, and only two possible options for every Western country that foolishly opened its borders to the world, and soon, apparently, Japan. One is the repatriation of all non-European peoples. Two is mass violence. And everyone who opposes the former is implicitly choosing the latter.

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