[dougabug]

Hm, I confess I don’t understand what you are talking about. Who is claiming that there is a global (or even national) meritocracy? What is meritocracy?

Do immigrants outperform natives? On what metrics?

Let’s suppose, as a thought experiment, said immigrants outperform natives at being seven feet tall, since maybe we need them for some set of tasks and we are short of seven footers. If we preferentially admit seven footers and find that immigrants statistically outperform natives at being tall, I don’t see that we’ve necessarily disproven all forms of meritocracy.

[wutbrodo]

It's the top of the thread, the comment that I replied to and was referring to.

> If it were a true meritocracy, I guess we would expect ~4-5% of US academics to be US born, given that it's our percentage of the world population, but in practice there are huge obstacles for foreigners to come and work here and succeed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32595436

My claim was that even avid restrictionists don't claim a global meritocracy. They are optimizing other axe: Volk-style prioritization,cultural stability, etc.