Zeke Hernandez

They can produce more.

Often the fallacy is that we think of new people just as consumers, but not as producers.

And that's producers of new ideas, producers of a lot of different things.

And so once you understand that and you kind of detach yourself from that fallacy of human systems being identical to like,

you know, your backyard, right?

Which is a kind of this closed sandbox with limited carrying capacity.

You start to realize that more people actually is often the solution and new people in particular, not just more, but also new people because they bring this variety, right?

Whether it's a variety of, you know, human physical health systems or a variety of ideas or other assets as an economist would say it.

That's so important because if you look at, actually, you trace the lineage of our current anti-immigrant movements and think tanks in many parts of the world, they started with this idea of carrying capacity being limited.

Yeah, yeah, obviously on a shorter timescale than what Sonia spoke about, the evidence on this is also pretty good in that, you know, immigrants assimilate successfully to society, to the values and the economy and the language of the receiving society.

Now, the way that we stop that, we can't,

slow down the process if we threaten immigrants or if we put in place policies that are dysfunctional and slow down the process.

We can do that.

Usually the way we do that is that we tend to also have another fallacy, similar to the fallacy of carrying capacity, the fallacy that cultures are competing

entities, right?

So that cultures exist on a continuum.

And if you move towards one, you have to move away from the other.

And therefore we insist that immigrants assimilate, but the mental model we have is that assimilation means abandon your previous identity, right?

Abandon your previous language, abandon your previous cultural values, abandon what you used to eat.

But we know from cultural psychology that cultures can coexist.