We should have a list of first names which immigrants must use for their children under aged 5 or as yet unborn. France had someting like this for everybody, at one time.
That was a running gag at an old workplace. A particular manager would tell us to do something and after it failed to produce results for a reasonable time his solution was always to tell us to do the same thing with different words. His underlings would paraphrase this as [whatever the failed tactic was] HARDER.
Harder means you load up on repression. They don't try repression. Sometimes, integration only works when you combine it with repression and you target the right target.
I believe free expression has the advantage here. It is useful to know if parents expect their children to integrate or not. It is better not to force this information into hiding.
I agree. Indians seem pretty ethnocentric and a lot of first and second generation still marry other Indians. I have never met someone with two Indian parents (even if both are born here) with an Euro name, and when one parent is white they seem to split the difference on that front. There is still a ton of pressure to only marry other Indians.
In contrast I meet tons of Asian and Latino kids with very traditional American names. One of the ladies that cleans my house is from Central America and doesn’t speak a lick of English but she named her son Kevin.
Lynn and Vanhanen have India at average IQ 82, but I don't believe that, or maybe that number was reduced by then-endemic parasitic infestations. I would believe that in the case of the Roma, but that is a specific subpopulation.
The country as a whole is making big progress recently. They only started liberalizing the Licence Raj in 1991, but averaged around 6 per cent economic growth since then, and now the compounding is becoming really visible. They just electrified almost the entire railway network (almost 33 000 kms of rail) in just a few years, and they are testing their Gaganyaan human-rated spaceship right now - I wonder if it performs better than Boeing's?
I don't think you can do this with an average IQ of 82, even with a large population. 92 is much more plausible.
It could well be that India's genetic potential is higher than what was achieved under it's pretty awful culture. Like I said, MAGA immigrants to India would likely turn into egalitarian progressives.
I live next door to Poland and the difference between late-stage Communist Poland in the late 1980s (shops empty, cities shabby, drunkards lying everywhere) vs. today is just incredible.
We used to have a joke that if Communism triumphed in the Sahara, it would result in a shortage of sand soon.
The Soviet Union-inspired centrally managed economies were/are just awful anywhere they have been tried, including India.
IDK what government services you encountered, but Polish government is really good at building stuff. Railways, public buildings, multi-lane highways. They were able to get the usual NIMBY lobby under control, the environmental movement is nowhere nearly as strong as in German-speaking countries, and thus whatever takes 10 years in Germany will take 2 in Poland.
They also have a decent military.
I heard complaints about stuff such as "issuance of passports", though, and Czech railway managers complained about unwilingness of Polish authorities to co-operate when upgrading shared tracks (we have two railway lines that cross into Polish territory for a few km, and they are run under a special treaty regime. And given that no Polish citizens use them, Warsaw DGAF about their condition.)
Is the Czech before-Communism/after-Communism comparison as stark as in Poland? If not, why not? Czechs less defeated by Communism? Or less energized by liberty? Both?
Indians are great at making people from other cultures over-estimate them. The two items you mention sound impressive but experience suggests the details would be revealing. Anyway, you absolutely can install a bunch of tech invented long ago by other people on a short timeline if you have enough absolutely numbers of non-retarded people. There's a billion people in India.
if we assume US IQ average 105 India's average IQ of 82 puts them at about 1.5 standard Deviations below us. That's about 6.7% of 1.46 Billion people in India with the American average or greater (~97 Million). America's population is ~320 Million so we have about 160 million people of above average IQ. it's more but not drastically more.
> Lynn and Vanhanen have India at average IQ 82, but I don't believe that <
Lynn and Vanhanen's work was super-important. The existence of these wide HBD variances is the most critical information to understanding the world.
But that said, their actual numbers are like a "snapshot" of various societies at various levels of development. This is *not independent* of, but nonetheless *not the same* as actual genetic potential of the people.
As Steve mentions the conditions in India--absolute nutritional stunting, disease burden, poverty levels and crappy commitment to decent universal education--mean that these numbers are quite reduced from both
a) what Indians would achieve in conditions of the modern West (i.e. comparative genetic potential)
and
b) what Indians can achieve in India--in a society built by Indians themselves--when Indians finally get their act together
> I don't think you can do this with an average IQ of 82, even with a large population. 92 is much more plausible. <
My guess would be in-between.
But the absolutely critical thing to understand about Indians is that there is *no* "Indian people" the way there are "Englishmen" or "Germans" or "Swedes".
With Europeans there were really only two separate ethnic groups--the nation's people and Jews. Normal people had normal social classes. But even amongst those there was considerable gene flow. You have genetic lineages that go from "cute peasant girl" through the gentry and nobility to royalty in a few hundred years. And vice versa.
In India you have literally tens of thousands of essentially separate breeding populations for a couple thousand years. At one end you have Brahmin groups that have had a literate tradition--like rabbinic Judaism--and selection for it, for eons and at the other end forest tribals barely a notch above Adaman Islanders. (It is the most diverse nation on the planet--aside from modern "y'all come on down!" America.)
When the Chicoms get to the moon in the next decade or so, it will be because the Han Chinese are a smart "moon-capable" people and there are a billion plus of them. If Indians get to the moon--sometime in the later 21st century after I'm long dead and gone--it will because there is a small layer of sufficiently capable upcaste Indians sufficient to push this through when the government deemed it a priority.
A super simple binary American model of India would be imagine 350 million whites and 1.1 billion blacks. Not quite South Africa, but not America either. A more advanced four-bean model would be something like 30m Jews, 170m whites, 850m Mexicans, 350m blacks. Indians can quibble about the numbers, but that's the rough picture. A lot of talent, but a whole lot of mediocrity. Probably takes something like 50-100 eigenvectors to craft a decently accurate population model of India. To nail actual India you probably a few thousand.
Indians are the closest "incoming!" we have to Jews--solid achievement, but separateness/hostility and feelings of superiority to the WhiteBread normies. It's a toxic brew.
As my best friend--Indian guy from grad school--put it: "Indians come here, live in million dollar houses and think they're oppressed."
The lone positive is it has no generational staying power. Indians are the most ethno-centric and least out-marrying of the Asian immigrant groups, but still out-marry at 50%. The 2nd generation kids think of themselves as "Indian", may want their Indian food and fancy wedding sari ... but on the whole they are just American kids. (Ex. Usha Vance.) It's hard to think there are going to be many serious 3rd gen rah-rah "Hindus" here.
Judaism was built/evolved to be a tribal identity cult--Jews worshipping their "chosen people" Jewishness--that kept them separate from the Christian host population. We've seen 2nd, 3rd, and now even 4th and 5th generation Jews rabidly screeching against and tearing down "white bread" America.
But Hinduism didn't evolve as an outgroup strategy. It's essentially built to support the feudal order in India, and outside of India has little staying power.
The main thing necessary to deal with Indians is the same, obvious, thing we need in general ... cut off the inflow. Do that and a few generations in they'll be gone.
Stop the immivasion now and avoid downloading Steve's "world's most important graph" and while we won't be America--and probably won't be competitive with China--we could still be a decent place for our posterity to live.
Indian ceos of USA companies are moving jobs to India. Maybe at a certain point between USA jobs moved to India and India advancing economically, there won't be as many Indians moving to the US.
Trivial observation--I recently read Middlemarch, and Mr. Brooke (one of the characters) is constantly saying 'up to a point', or 'up to a certain point', which made me wonder if Waugh's usage in Scoop was a reference to George Eliot. However, Waugh thought Eliot to be a complete waste of time, so it's not likely that he stole the phrase from her. The phrase apparently was in common usage amongst newspaper men of the time, but whether it preceded Waugh's use or followed it is unclear.
The barely concealed hatred for rank and file White conservatives by right wing intellectuals never ceases to amaze me. They just can’t seem to stop themselves from insulting them by calling them NASCAR watching, burger eating, gun toting MAGA rednecks. This applies to everyone from Bill Krystal to Ross Douthat and, unfortunately, our esteemed host. However, I never see them criticizing the even more downmarket Latinos I see everywhere. I hope some of them live to see the awesome America that will surely be built once all the awful White MAGA people are gone.
We in the U.S. have spent the past 50 years making any negative observations about people of other races and cultures so unacceptable that criticizing the lower classes of white Americans is all that’s left for satisfying the innate human need to feel superior to someone else. You can giggle at rude comments about white rubes, but nothing will shut down your social acceptability and career prospects faster than openly showing disdain for ghetto culture or the guys hanging out in the Home Depot parking lot. I myself am no fan of many aspects of redneck culture, but the hypocrisy is stunning.
Why do idiots like you who’ve never set foot in India think you understand the country? You want MAGA immigrants to India naming their kids American style? No one would bat an eye. No wonder low IQ fools like you tarnish your country’s reputation.
My favorite, probably apocryphal story about India is the Nehru govt polling the people's attitude to independence. They kept hearing "Who are the British?"
> In the very long run, India won’t be such a dump anymore and emigration of Indians to America will tail off.
But when?
2125? 2225? <
LOL. You really are a wild-eyed optimist Steve.
Life is actually ridiculously comfortable for successful upcaste Indians. Nice marble floored houses, servants at beck and call. Yet the top graduates still on average try and head to the US for a life in UMC suburbia and fetching their own stuff at Costco.
For another 1.3 billion--that's *billion* with nine zeros--Indians, life in the US even doing working class labor would be a huge upgrade. That's why we've got border hopping, California licensed, truck driving Sikh illegals murdering Americans spectacularly every month on our highways.
> In the very long run, India won’t be such a dump anymore and emigration of Indians to America will tail off.
But when?
2125? 2225?
The key thing is to prevent America and India from converging by letting the quality of life in America not stay way ahead of India. <
Steve, this is simply a great post. While focused on "the Indian question"--our new replacement Jews--you are hitting on the critical big broad issues that bedevil America/the West today.
With your end wrap, you strip naked the core logic of these "nation of immigrants" genocidal loons:
"Nation of immigrants" == "We'll keep flooding your nation with foreigners till it is so crowded, unpleasant and shitty that even people from Haiti and Niger don't want to come."
It would have been interesting to get Waugh’s thoughts on India. Brits of his generation seemed pretty bored with the Subcontinent, which only figures in his stories as a place of employment for middling government functionaries like his maternal uncles, so he travelled instead in North Africa and the Amazon, and seems only to have stopped in coastal ports like Goa and Ceylon.
It’s forgotten now, but one of the many quixotic causes over which Winston Churchill made himself so fantastically unpopular in the 1930s was his fanatical opposition to Indian independence, which (unlike Ireland) was not a subject which commanded any popular domestic support.
I've been amazed by the hysterical anti-India bashing on X ever since Vivek sent out that tweet last December lambasting native born white American culture. Now it seems like we're endlessly inundated with angry white guys on X telling us how the average IQ of India is supposedly in the mid 70s to low 80s. I'm not an expert on genetics by any means, but I was always under the impression that India was highly racially heterogenous with significant differences in intelligence by caste. Thus, adopting a mental model where the average IQ of India is at best in the low 80s fails to account for the obviously high achievements of diaspora South Asians.
There's plenty of evidence that we've gotten very high end immigration from India in this country, as Jason Richwine noted back in 2009. Richwine for instance estimates that Indian American IQ is roughly 112 relative to the white normed average of 100, comparable to that of Ashkenazi Jews. Even if the racial dynamics of India are messy and complicated, it seems obvious that the disproportionate success of South Asian Americans belies any claim that that immigrant group is somehow low in average IQ.
For what it's worth, I found neither Vivek's tweet last December nor his most recent one to be all that objectionable. I mean didn't Tiger Mother basically write an entire book on lax western parenting? I don't recall Amy Chua getting nearly the same heat back then that Vivek is getting now, although admittedly the political environment during the second Trump administration is rather different than the zeitgeist during the early 2010s.
As for Vivek's claim that America is a creedal nation, personally I'm actually highly sympathetic to the alternative perspective espoused by the late Samuel Huntington, who articulated in his book Who Are We the distinction between a nation united by ethnicity and culture and a nation-state as a political entity governing a large group of individuals.
I've always been struck by the claim made in Who Are We and other books like Alien Nation by Peter Brimelow that if immigration had completely ceased after 1790 that the American population even as recently as 1990 would've been around half of its actual size at that time. A sizable portion of white Americans can in fact trace their heritage back to the original colonial stock.
That being said, I think many people missed the point of Vivek's tweet. He followed up his initial comment by clarifying that he wasn't advocating for unfettered immigration, but rather that he was arguing against the notion of employing a caste system to rank the quality of American citizens based on their ethnic heritage. While we certainly can be selective about who we let become American citizens, the idea of a heritage citizen above and beyond any other American citizen is ultimately counterproductive. What would be the end goal of such a distinction? Would it be to somehow create different rights based on the grade of American one was deemed to be?
Ultimately, as Vivek argued and as I also believe, we can recognize America's ethnic history and heritage without becoming captive to it. Isn't it deeply ironic that the same MAGA that shits all over India and Indian Americans essentially wants some sort of quasi-caste system in this country for ranking the quality of Americans?
We should have a list of first names which immigrants must use for their children under aged 5 or as yet unborn. France had someting like this for everybody, at one time.
We British tried multi-culturalism and it didn’t work, France tried integration and it didn’t work. Lesson?
France didn't try integration hard
• 30% aliens
• racial classification forbidden by law
• mandatory French language and French culture
What part of integration did they miss?
That it doesn't work that way. Large parts of French cities are no-go areas for the police.
That was a running gag at an old workplace. A particular manager would tell us to do something and after it failed to produce results for a reasonable time his solution was always to tell us to do the same thing with different words. His underlings would paraphrase this as [whatever the failed tactic was] HARDER.
It was an an occasionally funny gag.
Harder means you load up on repression. They don't try repression. Sometimes, integration only works when you combine it with repression and you target the right target.
I believe free expression has the advantage here. It is useful to know if parents expect their children to integrate or not. It is better not to force this information into hiding.
I agree. Indians seem pretty ethnocentric and a lot of first and second generation still marry other Indians. I have never met someone with two Indian parents (even if both are born here) with an Euro name, and when one parent is white they seem to split the difference on that front. There is still a ton of pressure to only marry other Indians.
In contrast I meet tons of Asian and Latino kids with very traditional American names. One of the ladies that cleans my house is from Central America and doesn’t speak a lick of English but she named her son Kevin.
Let’s be like France 😆
Lynn and Vanhanen have India at average IQ 82, but I don't believe that, or maybe that number was reduced by then-endemic parasitic infestations. I would believe that in the case of the Roma, but that is a specific subpopulation.
The country as a whole is making big progress recently. They only started liberalizing the Licence Raj in 1991, but averaged around 6 per cent economic growth since then, and now the compounding is becoming really visible. They just electrified almost the entire railway network (almost 33 000 kms of rail) in just a few years, and they are testing their Gaganyaan human-rated spaceship right now - I wonder if it performs better than Boeing's?
I don't think you can do this with an average IQ of 82, even with a large population. 92 is much more plausible.
It could well be that India's genetic potential is higher than what was achieved under it's pretty awful culture. Like I said, MAGA immigrants to India would likely turn into egalitarian progressives.
Culture/system matters a lot.
I live next door to Poland and the difference between late-stage Communist Poland in the late 1980s (shops empty, cities shabby, drunkards lying everywhere) vs. today is just incredible.
We used to have a joke that if Communism triumphed in the Sahara, it would result in a shortage of sand soon.
The Soviet Union-inspired centrally managed economies were/are just awful anywhere they have been tried, including India.
2025 Poland seems to be terrific at capitalism and lousy at government service jobs.
"lousy at government service jobs."
IDK what government services you encountered, but Polish government is really good at building stuff. Railways, public buildings, multi-lane highways. They were able to get the usual NIMBY lobby under control, the environmental movement is nowhere nearly as strong as in German-speaking countries, and thus whatever takes 10 years in Germany will take 2 in Poland.
They also have a decent military.
I heard complaints about stuff such as "issuance of passports", though, and Czech railway managers complained about unwilingness of Polish authorities to co-operate when upgrading shared tracks (we have two railway lines that cross into Polish territory for a few km, and they are run under a special treaty regime. And given that no Polish citizens use them, Warsaw DGAF about their condition.)
Is the Czech before-Communism/after-Communism comparison as stark as in Poland? If not, why not? Czechs less defeated by Communism? Or less energized by liberty? Both?
Indians are great at making people from other cultures over-estimate them. The two items you mention sound impressive but experience suggests the details would be revealing. Anyway, you absolutely can install a bunch of tech invented long ago by other people on a short timeline if you have enough absolutely numbers of non-retarded people. There's a billion people in India.
if we assume US IQ average 105 India's average IQ of 82 puts them at about 1.5 standard Deviations below us. That's about 6.7% of 1.46 Billion people in India with the American average or greater (~97 Million). America's population is ~320 Million so we have about 160 million people of above average IQ. it's more but not drastically more.
Maybe they have a shallow curve
> Lynn and Vanhanen have India at average IQ 82, but I don't believe that <
Lynn and Vanhanen's work was super-important. The existence of these wide HBD variances is the most critical information to understanding the world.
But that said, their actual numbers are like a "snapshot" of various societies at various levels of development. This is *not independent* of, but nonetheless *not the same* as actual genetic potential of the people.
As Steve mentions the conditions in India--absolute nutritional stunting, disease burden, poverty levels and crappy commitment to decent universal education--mean that these numbers are quite reduced from both
a) what Indians would achieve in conditions of the modern West (i.e. comparative genetic potential)
and
b) what Indians can achieve in India--in a society built by Indians themselves--when Indians finally get their act together
> I don't think you can do this with an average IQ of 82, even with a large population. 92 is much more plausible. <
My guess would be in-between.
But the absolutely critical thing to understand about Indians is that there is *no* "Indian people" the way there are "Englishmen" or "Germans" or "Swedes".
With Europeans there were really only two separate ethnic groups--the nation's people and Jews. Normal people had normal social classes. But even amongst those there was considerable gene flow. You have genetic lineages that go from "cute peasant girl" through the gentry and nobility to royalty in a few hundred years. And vice versa.
In India you have literally tens of thousands of essentially separate breeding populations for a couple thousand years. At one end you have Brahmin groups that have had a literate tradition--like rabbinic Judaism--and selection for it, for eons and at the other end forest tribals barely a notch above Adaman Islanders. (It is the most diverse nation on the planet--aside from modern "y'all come on down!" America.)
When the Chicoms get to the moon in the next decade or so, it will be because the Han Chinese are a smart "moon-capable" people and there are a billion plus of them. If Indians get to the moon--sometime in the later 21st century after I'm long dead and gone--it will because there is a small layer of sufficiently capable upcaste Indians sufficient to push this through when the government deemed it a priority.
A super simple binary American model of India would be imagine 350 million whites and 1.1 billion blacks. Not quite South Africa, but not America either. A more advanced four-bean model would be something like 30m Jews, 170m whites, 850m Mexicans, 350m blacks. Indians can quibble about the numbers, but that's the rough picture. A lot of talent, but a whole lot of mediocrity. Probably takes something like 50-100 eigenvectors to craft a decently accurate population model of India. To nail actual India you probably a few thousand.
“Up to a point, Lord Copper” is a family expression trotted out for howlers
Indians are the closest "incoming!" we have to Jews--solid achievement, but separateness/hostility and feelings of superiority to the WhiteBread normies. It's a toxic brew.
As my best friend--Indian guy from grad school--put it: "Indians come here, live in million dollar houses and think they're oppressed."
The lone positive is it has no generational staying power. Indians are the most ethno-centric and least out-marrying of the Asian immigrant groups, but still out-marry at 50%. The 2nd generation kids think of themselves as "Indian", may want their Indian food and fancy wedding sari ... but on the whole they are just American kids. (Ex. Usha Vance.) It's hard to think there are going to be many serious 3rd gen rah-rah "Hindus" here.
Judaism was built/evolved to be a tribal identity cult--Jews worshipping their "chosen people" Jewishness--that kept them separate from the Christian host population. We've seen 2nd, 3rd, and now even 4th and 5th generation Jews rabidly screeching against and tearing down "white bread" America.
But Hinduism didn't evolve as an outgroup strategy. It's essentially built to support the feudal order in India, and outside of India has little staying power.
The main thing necessary to deal with Indians is the same, obvious, thing we need in general ... cut off the inflow. Do that and a few generations in they'll be gone.
Stop the immivasion now and avoid downloading Steve's "world's most important graph" and while we won't be America--and probably won't be competitive with China--we could still be a decent place for our posterity to live.
Indian ceos of USA companies are moving jobs to India. Maybe at a certain point between USA jobs moved to India and India advancing economically, there won't be as many Indians moving to the US.
Trivial observation--I recently read Middlemarch, and Mr. Brooke (one of the characters) is constantly saying 'up to a point', or 'up to a certain point', which made me wonder if Waugh's usage in Scoop was a reference to George Eliot. However, Waugh thought Eliot to be a complete waste of time, so it's not likely that he stole the phrase from her. The phrase apparently was in common usage amongst newspaper men of the time, but whether it preceded Waugh's use or followed it is unclear.
The barely concealed hatred for rank and file White conservatives by right wing intellectuals never ceases to amaze me. They just can’t seem to stop themselves from insulting them by calling them NASCAR watching, burger eating, gun toting MAGA rednecks. This applies to everyone from Bill Krystal to Ross Douthat and, unfortunately, our esteemed host. However, I never see them criticizing the even more downmarket Latinos I see everywhere. I hope some of them live to see the awesome America that will surely be built once all the awful White MAGA people are gone.
We in the U.S. have spent the past 50 years making any negative observations about people of other races and cultures so unacceptable that criticizing the lower classes of white Americans is all that’s left for satisfying the innate human need to feel superior to someone else. You can giggle at rude comments about white rubes, but nothing will shut down your social acceptability and career prospects faster than openly showing disdain for ghetto culture or the guys hanging out in the Home Depot parking lot. I myself am no fan of many aspects of redneck culture, but the hypocrisy is stunning.
Why do idiots like you who’ve never set foot in India think you understand the country? You want MAGA immigrants to India naming their kids American style? No one would bat an eye. No wonder low IQ fools like you tarnish your country’s reputation.
The majority of India has yet to gain Internet access Steve, I believe it's at 62% without. None of us will make it if Modi gives it to them.
My favorite, probably apocryphal story about India is the Nehru govt polling the people's attitude to independence. They kept hearing "Who are the British?"
> In the very long run, India won’t be such a dump anymore and emigration of Indians to America will tail off.
But when?
2125? 2225? <
LOL. You really are a wild-eyed optimist Steve.
Life is actually ridiculously comfortable for successful upcaste Indians. Nice marble floored houses, servants at beck and call. Yet the top graduates still on average try and head to the US for a life in UMC suburbia and fetching their own stuff at Costco.
For another 1.3 billion--that's *billion* with nine zeros--Indians, life in the US even doing working class labor would be a huge upgrade. That's why we've got border hopping, California licensed, truck driving Sikh illegals murdering Americans spectacularly every month on our highways.
> In the very long run, India won’t be such a dump anymore and emigration of Indians to America will tail off.
But when?
2125? 2225?
The key thing is to prevent America and India from converging by letting the quality of life in America not stay way ahead of India. <
Steve, this is simply a great post. While focused on "the Indian question"--our new replacement Jews--you are hitting on the critical big broad issues that bedevil America/the West today.
With your end wrap, you strip naked the core logic of these "nation of immigrants" genocidal loons:
"Nation of immigrants" == "We'll keep flooding your nation with foreigners till it is so crowded, unpleasant and shitty that even people from Haiti and Niger don't want to come."
It would have been interesting to get Waugh’s thoughts on India. Brits of his generation seemed pretty bored with the Subcontinent, which only figures in his stories as a place of employment for middling government functionaries like his maternal uncles, so he travelled instead in North Africa and the Amazon, and seems only to have stopped in coastal ports like Goa and Ceylon.
It’s forgotten now, but one of the many quixotic causes over which Winston Churchill made himself so fantastically unpopular in the 1930s was his fanatical opposition to Indian independence, which (unlike Ireland) was not a subject which commanded any popular domestic support.
Strong antagonistic cultures are only a problem for America if they come over here. I am perfectly content with fervent Hindu nationalists in India.
I've been amazed by the hysterical anti-India bashing on X ever since Vivek sent out that tweet last December lambasting native born white American culture. Now it seems like we're endlessly inundated with angry white guys on X telling us how the average IQ of India is supposedly in the mid 70s to low 80s. I'm not an expert on genetics by any means, but I was always under the impression that India was highly racially heterogenous with significant differences in intelligence by caste. Thus, adopting a mental model where the average IQ of India is at best in the low 80s fails to account for the obviously high achievements of diaspora South Asians.
https://www.aei.org/articles/indian-americans-the-new-model-minority/
There's plenty of evidence that we've gotten very high end immigration from India in this country, as Jason Richwine noted back in 2009. Richwine for instance estimates that Indian American IQ is roughly 112 relative to the white normed average of 100, comparable to that of Ashkenazi Jews. Even if the racial dynamics of India are messy and complicated, it seems obvious that the disproportionate success of South Asian Americans belies any claim that that immigrant group is somehow low in average IQ.
For what it's worth, I found neither Vivek's tweet last December nor his most recent one to be all that objectionable. I mean didn't Tiger Mother basically write an entire book on lax western parenting? I don't recall Amy Chua getting nearly the same heat back then that Vivek is getting now, although admittedly the political environment during the second Trump administration is rather different than the zeitgeist during the early 2010s.
As for Vivek's claim that America is a creedal nation, personally I'm actually highly sympathetic to the alternative perspective espoused by the late Samuel Huntington, who articulated in his book Who Are We the distinction between a nation united by ethnicity and culture and a nation-state as a political entity governing a large group of individuals.
I've always been struck by the claim made in Who Are We and other books like Alien Nation by Peter Brimelow that if immigration had completely ceased after 1790 that the American population even as recently as 1990 would've been around half of its actual size at that time. A sizable portion of white Americans can in fact trace their heritage back to the original colonial stock.
That being said, I think many people missed the point of Vivek's tweet. He followed up his initial comment by clarifying that he wasn't advocating for unfettered immigration, but rather that he was arguing against the notion of employing a caste system to rank the quality of American citizens based on their ethnic heritage. While we certainly can be selective about who we let become American citizens, the idea of a heritage citizen above and beyond any other American citizen is ultimately counterproductive. What would be the end goal of such a distinction? Would it be to somehow create different rights based on the grade of American one was deemed to be?
Ultimately, as Vivek argued and as I also believe, we can recognize America's ethnic history and heritage without becoming captive to it. Isn't it deeply ironic that the same MAGA that shits all over India and Indian Americans essentially wants some sort of quasi-caste system in this country for ranking the quality of Americans?