Yeah. Most democrat leaning people here and outside are not reading the situation correctly.
We are currently in the process of the creation of a new world order. Its happening everywhere. Right-wing, anti-immigrant, egomaniacs with little respect for democracy as we know it are taking power in all of the western influence sphere. It might be because this is the way countries like China/russia can undermine the hegemony of the west. It might be because of the way the internet works that takes away power from the systems that used to work. Or what we could conclude that the story the liberals/left are telling all over the world implicitly locks out most people that vote and is self destructive. Either way. Don't believe the pundits they are consistently wrong.
The anti-immigration thing is because the great experiment of mass migration has failed to work for the average person, and the political left have failed to show up with an answer, a policy, a plan -- anything, really. People are voting for candidates who are at least willing to pay lip service to the issue. I don't know how bad it is in the US, but in the rest of the West, it's been a disaster. Overcrowded cities, erosion of quality of life, strained services, competition for housing, suppression of wages, the complete abandonment of on-the-job training, falling tertiary education standards, minority enclaves with values that are fundamentally incompatible with the West... The list goes on.
Very few of the things you’re listing are caused by immigration. They’re caused by institutional neglect. The person telling you they’re caused by immigration has no intention of addressing the institutional neglect, because that doesn’t get them power.
Meanwhile, the services you need, right down to food, are supplied in many cases by immigrants. So it’s working for the average person extremely well.
Both of you are taking these blatantly extreme narratives and putting them ot as though they were fact.
The reality is that immigration is not all good for the average person. Similarly, it's not all bad for the average person either. When we frame these discussions in the stark extremist terms on either side, we get into trouble.
We have to calibrate immigration, so that we get the good, without getting so much of the bad. There are so many untruths floating out there right now about immigration on both sides that it's hard for the people trying do that calibrating to actually make any progress. When we try to get a handle on the good or the bad, invariably, someone's narrative is going to be shown as false.
There is an impact on wages, that's lamentable and it causes pain in a lot of the middle class. Let's put our heads together and see how can we address that?
Some people are not willing to admit that there are people of foreign origin who are critical additions to our intellectual capital. But a reasoned analysis would concede that H1B's are not even close to the same as NIWs in that regard. We probably can source a lot of H1B work natively. We should still offer the H1B opportunity though, so what does that balance look like?
Crime? Crime is definitely a problem. The data shows that it doesn't get better through the generations as one side would have you believe. At the same time, it isn't as prolific among people of foreign origin as the other side would have you believe. (Heck, in all honesty, the data shows crime isn't even as prolific among native born Americans as one side would have you believe.) Do we have to address it? Absolutely, but we shouldn't look at everyone as a criminal.
We need balance to address these issues wisely, but balance is severely lacking in contemporary civic discourse here in the US. And therefore, balance is lacking in our policy decisions.
I know this will sound like denialism but data on crime that claims it's going down doesn't match my day to day experience and so I tend to believe something is wrong with the data.
Ideas that come to mind are (1) reclassifing crimes as not crimes - instant reduction in crime in stats but no reduction in actual crime and victims (2) less reporting because of less enforcement as in police don't enforce the laws either because they don't want to or because there are less of them so there is less reportihg (3) less reporting because of uselessness. if you don't believe the police will do anything why report it. Car gets broken into, reporting is a chore that produces no results, reporting to car insurance just raises your rates.
Etc... as just one example I recently rented a car at SFO and there were signs saying don't leave anything valuable in your trunk because of theft. that's effectively saying the government isn't working to prevent this crime so the criminals are winning so you can no longer use a car for one if it's intended purposes. In can fully imagine in 20 years we'll be told not to store any valuables in our houses. that not how it should work.
I lived in the mission in Sf. Crime is way worse today than 20 than ago, any stats that claim otherwise are lying
>Jeff Bezos(01:34:00) We were going over a weekly business review and a set of documents, and I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. And it doesn't mean you just slavishly go follow the anecdotes then.
Same experience when I studied in Germany. My house got broken into by a Bosnian migrant, with CCTV footage showing the face and all, brought it to the police but nothing came out of it, citing footage not enough to incriminate. Bs really.
> The reality is that immigration is not all good for the average person.
This statement is far too general. You need to divide high skill and low skill immigrants. Almost all economists would say that high skill immigration is good for your economy, and those immigrants are much more likely (than natives) to start businesses and create jobs. There are many, many academic studies about this type of immigrant in a wide variety of highly advanced nations. In 2024, a large number of highly advanced nations (all over the world) have active, aggressive high skill immigration schemes. Rich governments really want these people to come.
Regarding low skill immigration, it can help to supress labor costs (and indirectly control inflation) in very high labor industries, such as non-commodity crop farming (vegetables, fruits, etc.) and food processing. That said, if uncontrolled, it will have a negative economic impact upon low skill natives.
A nuance of like to add, though: some of the ways of controlling immigration, in particular revocable economic visas, are _designed_ to push down the cost of labour at the expensive of natives.
IMHO, if you get permission to work in a country, it shouldn’t be revocable. The revocation just serves as a way of paying the immigrant, and therefore the native who could also do the job, less.
I have worked under different visa in different countries. In most cases, if you lose your job (fired, downsizing, whatever), you need to leave in a few months (or find a job very quickly). This is not unique to the US H1B system.
This is simply the ancient political strategy of blaming our problems on groups of people that are different, and not actually taking responsibility to identify and fix the real causes. It is a formula as old as time for despots to seize power by fabricating an enemy that doesn’t exist from peoples prejudice and fear.
you can’t reduce ecological principles to just rhetoric. less resources, more requirements = more strain. the more resources to share, the less impact of the same shared unit, the easier it is to dispense to whoever. sharing resources with others with those who share other properties is more acceptable to most. but this propensity is generally reduced with more resources to share. humans band into groups in competition for resources when they are scarce.
just as how people are getting triggered online more easily by displeasure, so they are triggered by the bad apples more than the invisible good ones. there’s more of good ones, but the larger their absolute number, the more resources are shared and the more bad apples there are, the more this sharing becomes problematic. the fewer shared properties there are, the less there is to dilute the bad-applehood.
abstracting away from this into a symbolic ideal (equivalence via property of “humanhood” and equivalence via property of “need” determined via capacity of empathy and Christian virtue) does no one any good and is experienced as a result of effacement of shared histories (roots). the idea that real present (ie, ahistorical) causative elements are always only just social or imperialist is ideology.
you can leverage not only a reaction, but also its object. increase the pressure, increase the resistance, propose solution (and hide other agendas behind it).
The actual things most people are concerned about aren’t even close to being zero sum- things like economic activity increase with more people and ingenuity. We’re in a time when innovation is rapidly letting us do more with less resources, we aren’t resource constrained for our real world quality of life. Rhetoric creates us vs. them situations that don’t exist in fact- while also artificially constructing groups to pit against one another along lines that only benefit the person creating them. Even if I did think things were zero sum and wanted to use government force to keep resources in my group- the “in group” I would choose isn’t the one any politicians are trying to sell me based on what people look like or where they were born.
"Lip-service" is probably a good way to put it, since all those issues are also happening in countries without a lot of immigration, but most people don't look too far outside of their own country when considering problems in it. It is easy to look for a simple to understand change, and lay the blame on it, and people like easy answers for things they would rather not have to think about (like economies).
Most of those issues are probably better explained by the trend for jobs, especially higher paying ones, to be more and more concentrated in cities. There has been almost no policy push to realistically address that from anyone, outside of lackluster and temporary measures to encourage jobs in smaller cities.
Constant immigration is not sustainable. Especially when people come from cultures which are very different than the west. They have different value systems, religions, etc. There is also the problem of scale, imagine if all of India moved to Germany. What would happen? At some point the politicians will have to look at the issue.
> Constant immigration is not sustainable. Especially when people come from cultures which are very different than the west. They have different value systems, religions, etc.
I lived in Northern Calfornia (Bay Area) for a few years. I would disagree with the quoted statement above. Yes, it was not perfect (ethnic) harmony, but there were absolutely wild(!) levels of immigration there -- all kinds of Asians (East, Southeast, and South) as well as Latins (Central and South America). Some how, some way, it worked; I guess because the economy was very strong. I would characterise most Latin cultures as _closer_ to Western European cultures because they are mostly Christian (though, some are Animist), so they have a Christian world view. However, East/Southeast/South Asians that immigrate to California are rarely Christian (some South Indians and South Koreas). Buddhists (so many types!), Confucianists/Daoists, Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs were are all present in the Asian immigrant community. For the first generation (the parents), they all stayed in very tight communities, but their kids learned to mix in public schools, unis, and early career jobs. I never got tired of hearing the funny stories when immigrant parents first learned that their children were dating outside their national/ethnic/religious group. At first, shock and disappointment, then later, acceptance.
Also, specifically regarding Germany, are you German, or have you lived there? Unfortunately, I see a lot of negative media about immigration in Germany ("Oh, too much! Cannot mix different types!" -- All that bullshit). But, then you talk to Germans, especially those under 40, and it is a different story. Many of them grew up with many immigrants in their schools. Germany is already much more multi-cultural than outsiders realise. The number of ethnic Turks in Germany would surprise many. In the last 20 years, this community has become much more integrated into wider Germany society. (They finally have some federal minister roles... whoot!) Yes, Germany has ethnic struggles, as any newly multi-cultural nation has, but, overall, they have a good attitude about it.
I live in an area with a lot of immigration and one side effect is that "entry level" jobs are just about impossible to get for teenagers and other low-skilled non-immigrant workers because of intense competition[1]. So no, the "average" American may not care about these jobs, but the poorest Americans and those "just starting out" do.
It's ironic to pay lip service to supporting the poor while kicking the ladder out from under them with immigration.
Well, we did have slavery. So I'm not sure I would necessarily call everyone since the Mayflower immigrants. Let's just say there has been a lot of movement of people into the US on a population adjusted basis since the Mayflower.
I personally don’t see much similarity between the mayflower (Europeans exiled to underpopulated territory in the empire) to a Chinese grad student coming to work a tech company. And that’s the ideal case!
Cultures are not monolithic, static entities. How do we go from "different cultures" to "negative outcomes?" That's a complete non-sequiter.
Imagine if all of Germany moved to India. What would happen? What if part of Britain moved to UK? At some point the politicians will have to look at the issue...
> During the 2015–2016 celebrations of New Year's Eve in Germany, approximately 1,200 women were reported to have been sexually assaulted, especially in the city of Cologne. In many of the incidents, while these women were in public spaces, they were surrounded and assaulted by large groups of men who were identified by officials as Arab or North African men.
Slightly off topic, but what's the difference between North African and Arab? Are Egyptians, Algerians, Libyans etc not real Arabs? How are they classified technically speaking?
If you would imagine a Venn diagram, North Africans are the cross between the Arabs and the Africans. Arabs being the culture, and African being the geographical region. The Arab culture was spread by the sword about 1,300 years ago.
I can see that. It confuses me mostly because North Africans seem, at least to the eye, far more similar to Arabs than they seem to sub-saharan Africans for instance. Arab influence in North Africa being so much more strong than the influence of any other group. Culturally, genetically etc etc.
Aren’t “Arabs” from the Arabic peninsula (sometimes including Israel and Turkey et al) and North Africans from … North Africa? They may be similar in many ways but they’re geographically distinct.
> imagine if all of India moved to Germany. What would happen?
Indian & East-Asian immigrants have much lower violence stats than the native populations. To that end, your example doesn't say much about the GP that you're replying to.
To steel man the GP, let's say they mean any 2 demographics, not German vs Indians specifically. But there in lies the core issue with immigrant conversations. You can't pick 'any 2 demographics'.
Different immigrant groups (grouped by nation/age/gender/religion/skill-level) demonstrate different integration characterisitics. All immigrant conversations should be painfully specific. The conversations will be politically insensitive. But this is a comment thread about Trump winning his 2nd term in office. So, clearly, the ship has already sailed on political correctness.
> Overcrowded cities, erosion of quality of life, strained services, competition for housing, suppression of wages, the complete abandonment of on-the-job training, falling tertiary education standards,
Pretty sure the ever wealthier owner class is to blame for that, not immigrants.
> minority enclaves with values that are fundamentally incompatible with the West
And this is a massively overblown problem mostly pushed to distract voters from those listed above.
Most of America 100 years ago was minority enclaves with values fundamentally incompatible with the "old" America. Worked out in the long run because we had a good run of a strong middle class. Money makes everyone merge.
But, the Republicans will just attempt to make the rich richer, and keep the poor and others isolated, then sell the story that the others are the ones keeping the middle class down, not the rich.
Immigration opponents just make up things so they can claim immigration caused it. The biggest tell is that they mention wage suppression, because they think it'll make them sound sympathetic - but there is absolutely zero evidence that immigration lowers any native wages, and theoretically you should expect it to increase them because of increased demand. (Conversely, when people move away this reduces demand and lowers your wages.)
That and employment for prime aged (i.e. not retirement age) Americans is as high as it's ever been.
Fortunately, we don't need to listen to any "academic economists" (who need to toe the party line) or even internet "experts", we can simply observe reality.
During COVID lockdowns, UK farmers complained that they can't get cheap foreigners to pick their strawberries. Obviously "lack of workforce" is just a propaganda expression for "we don't pay enough". Open borders directly reduces wages.
A single article with no counterfactual isn't as good as the existing literature, which has plenty of empirical studies (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-...). Academics love disagreeing with each other and economists are pretty bipartisan relative to other fields.
> Obviously "lack of workforce" is just a propaganda expression for "we don't pay enough"
Looks to me like this needs a specialized skilled workforce, otherwise they won't be able to pick the fruit in time for it to stay ripe.
Paying a smaller population of workers more will not necessarily encourage them to develop enough skills to do this job. It might just be left undone and then no fruit. If you have a larger population of potential workers, then there's more room for people to specialize in this because you have a larger economy.
> James Porter said 200 workers normally travelled to his farm in Scryne, Angus, from eastern Europe.
I'd like to know which part of Eastern Europe that means. If it was Ukraine they were bad then and worse now, but if it's Poland they have incredible economic growth right now and are on track to pass the UK before too long.
There is a current discussing in Sweden about the issue of human trafficking in picking fruits. Historically we have had a fairly large source of Asians being tricked to travel to northern Europe to pick forest fruits, with passports being taken, payments being withheld, and living standards beyond reasons. Last year a fairly large case was brought to bring down the human slavery and disgusting practices, and as a result the practice has been significantly reduced.
As a result the prices of forest fruit has increase multiple times and food companies are reporting a significant increase in costs thus needing to reduce the number of employees. Every industry above in the chain is feeling the economical impact of losing the human slavery. Local government is also concerned since the created void, in combination with increase wages, may encourage new independent illegal workers which then the state must handle.
Even leaving aside the human trafficking component, a lot of berry picking looks like a scam in Sweden. The costs to travel and live in Sweden rarely cover their earned wages. Their per hour earnings are surely far below Swedish minimum wage laws. Why do the Swedes allow it to continue?
The reason why Swedes allow it to continue is of similar reasons why people allow human trafficking in construction. It occurs in the background where it is not seen, it reduces costs, and makes people money.
If human slavery was a net-loss for countries then it wouldn't be historical popular. Be it building roads, railways, bridges, buildings, harvesting or picking fruits, those are not things people in general want to see prices increase. People who talk about illegal immigrants being a net-positive on the economy never talk about that aspect, in the same way that those being against illegal immigrants do not want to talk about increased costs. Even people who talk about human trafficking do not want to talk about human trafficking in construction or food production.
At one point the police even announced (as part of a political move in order to get more budget) that they would stop investigating construction places for human trafficking since just going to a single construction place would fill their work quota for that year, and thus everything else would had to be put at hold. Everyone who work in construction are fully aware of the open secret that a large part of all work is done by illegal workers that do not pay taxes (or minimum wages), do not get safety equipment, and is not limited by regulations that exist to protect workers. Sweden is far from unique in this aspect.
<< I'd like to know which part of Eastern Europe that means.
Not OP, but I can absolutely vouch for local negative sentiment in Eastern Europe. Granted, some of it is a direct result of war in Ukraine ( and a lot of those refugees getting benefits and priority for government services in host countries ).
It is hard for the population in general to get that they are getting a deal, when they don't. Maybe some individual billionaire does, but if anything, it only exacerbates the issue further by focusing anger on that one person.
I too am suspicous when companies and industries complain they cannot get enough cheap labour. However, there is a balance to be struck. If the UK needed to pay natives at prevailing wages, it might be 15 GBP per hour (or more) to pick strawberries, and then strawberries would probably double in price at the market... and very few people would buy them. When UK was part of the EU, there was freedom of movement, so a lot of seasonal workers came from Eastern Europe to work the fields in the UK. This probably helped to reduce UK food prices.
What bothers me much more: When companies and industries that generate middle class jobs (and above) complain about being unable to find workers. After the GFC ended around 2009, this was a constant complaint in business newspapers for many years (I guess at least five years during the post-GFC recovery). It was so obviously bullshit to even the most casual observer: The offered wages were much too low, so jobs stayed unfilled for months on end. In short, they wanted high skill people to work for low wages.
> Open borders directly reduces wages.
If this were true, how to do you explain why the UK grew so much faster than other EU nations in the decade before Brexit? Similarly, how do you explain how much worse is the UK economic story after Brexit? It seems exactly the opposite of what you wrote. One thing I will grant you: Open borders suppress wages for low skill workers. That is pretty much undeniable. The people hurt most by EU freedom of movement are low skill natives.
> how to do you explain why the UK grew so much faster than other EU nations in the decade before Brexit? Similarly, how do you explain how much worse is the UK economic story after Brexit? It seems exactly the opposite of what you wrote.
Are you sure about that? It seems about equal to me [1]...
In any case, Brexit didn't cause closing the borders; immigration into the UK increased massively [2] (i.e. the politicians didn't deliver what the people wanted). Any negative changes to the UK economy were more likely caused by decrease in trade with the EU... [3] Although COVID makes all these statistics suspect.
P-hack badly-constructed datasets until they find a coincidence in a dataset that reinforces their preferred narrative.
I mean, no, not all of them do that all of the time.
But it seems to be pretty common, and I'm not at all convinced that it's smarter, more correct, or wiser to live by research than by subjective experience.
Someone pointed out online, I forgot who, that the problem with job reports is two fold
It reports only those actively looking for a job or employed, so it leaves out people who simply aren’t participating in the labor market anymore because they can’t find one.
It also reports all jobs, not the quality of the jobs. Average Americans feel the job market today is terrible and largely does not look at part time and near minimum wage work roles growing as a positive. The jobs report doesn’t disaggregate higher paying jobs from lower ones
That may be true of the monthly jobs report numbers (don't remember how they work), but if you need to know then it's not an issue because there's alternatives.
Here's reports for all these that don't have those issues, as they just come from surveys.
> It reports only those actively looking for a job or employed, so it leaves out people who simply aren’t participating in the labor market anymore because they can’t find one.
This simply asks "do you have a job", and it's up to the people responding to decide if being an Uber driver is a job.
> Average Americans feel the job market today is terrible and largely does not look at part time and near minimum wage work roles growing as a positive.
Btw, I think focusing on "jobs" isn't the best thing to look at - the poorest people in a country will always be children and the elderly, and hopefully we don't want them to get jobs.
The jobs report is what most
media parrots across all media platforms more or less is the monthly jobs report and definitely the one I’m referencing.
No matter how you cut it though Americans do not feel they are getting their fair share economically and want to avenge that, which is why I think voters didn’t push back against tariffs - which have become a cornerstone of economic rhetoric by Trump and his allies - at the ballot box.
I think it’s also because a good chunk of the electorate doesn’t quite understand how tariffs work and it’s going to backfire, but the sentiment is very clear
Americans had what's called a vibecession where they universally thought the economy was bad, but then answered every question about their own finances by saying they were good. The implication was they thought it was bad for everyone else, just not them, so that's mostly on the media's negativity bias.
There was some hangover effect from inflation, although of course that's going to get worse now.
"I've been demonstrably wrong in every single point but I'm still right because I feel like it" is such a good demonstration of what happened this election.
Some people are hurting because there's always some people hurting, and for some reason that means we get the party that wants to reduce social safety nets?!
It seems fairly evident that human trafficking has had an economical positive effect on countries who practiced it. It is an common observed fact that the current construction sector is dependent on human trafficking and most current construction projects would fail to meet their goals without a steady stream of cheap, untaxed illegal labor that do not need to follow safety regulations.
However for people who work in those sectors the picture tend to look differently with wages and good safety practices being suppressed. Construction companies that follow regulations and pay taxes for all their employees will loose in the competitive market. The effect on the economy may be a net-positive, and it may also be true that most countries could not contain growth if construction actually cost as much as it had to without the illegal practices, but that is all multiple aspects of the same issue.
Immigration does have a net benefit to the economy, generally, but of course it tends to depress wages for anyone in sectors the immigrants are landing jobs in. Even NPR admits this, when they cover the topic. If this weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be a bunch of us wanting to loosen rules about foreign-trained doctors practicing in the US.
Whether those sectors include most of the people worried that their wages will be suppressed, when who we’re talking about are illegal immigrants who mostly do stuff like chicken processing and house framing/roofing, is another matter.
It’s weird that “we had a bipartisan bill to address specifically this thing you’re worried about, likely to pass and be signed into law, and Trump scuttled it so he could keep complaining about it” didn’t resonate. Frankly, if that’s too “technical” a message to be received, we really are fucked.
One reason for this is that immigrants have differing and complementary skills from natives - eg just speaking a different native language is a skill - and so they're not likely to land in the same sectors. They're more similar to other immigrants from the same place, and so it's more likely they'd lower each other's wages. I think this is totally believable, but the demand factor is still very important here - one immigrant could start a business and employ others etc.
> If this weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be a bunch of us wanting to loosen rules about foreign-trained doctors practicing in the US.
Doctors in the US are a special case because their number is so limited by the AMA and by (US government funded) residency slots. So yes, this could lower their wages if foreign doctors have similar enough skills to compete with them vs complement them. But it's more important for us to just stop limiting how many new doctors we train.
This wouldn't necessarily hurt them though; I mean it probably would, but if it made healthcare more affordable resulting in more people going to see doctors, then they'd all get paid more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Yeah the full answer is “it’s complicated and yes maybe some people see wages depressed or increases that would have happened, slowed, by immigration”. It can, for a given individual or even sector, do the thing people are worried about, even if most benefit—mean or even median wages tending to go up isn’t the same as your wages will go up. Simplified “it doesn’t lower wages” messaging has a smell to people burned by other neoliberal policies, and they’re not wrong to detect a hint of the ol’ BS, even if their concern is overblown or misplaced.
A guy answered me in another comment where I was saying similar things about wages, and apparently it's not true, it's an interesting read (which I can't criticize or comment since I'm not knowledgeable in economics) https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-...
It can be the case that immigration tends to buoy wages over all, while there do exist some for whom immigration will depress wages. Again, we’re definitely trying to do this when we craft targeted policies aimed at bringing in or discouraging immigrants for specific professions, and it does have the effect one would expect.
We have a history of doing the Neoliberal “well this will make line go up and we can just help the few whom it harms” and then not helping those few, so I get why people worried their wages might be some of the ones affected aren’t thrilled. Whether most of the folks so-concerned would actually see such a thing, is another matter (I’m guessing not, in at least 95% of cases of people with those concerns).
> but there is absolutely zero evidence that immigration lowers any native wages
What? You’re really claiming that increasing the supply side of a market has no effect on prices? That’s absurd. You shouldn’t need evidence for common sense. If labour supply is essentially unlimited then there is never pressure to increase wages. A literal child can understand this…
Using a pure supply argument for the labor market is the worst possible one to do it on. It's usually okay, but labor is people, and people are the source of all demand, so you really have to consider both of them.
Also, I'm going by empirical studies here. Those are better than beliefs, because truth is stranger than fiction.
All I know is in the UK it's not uncommon for jobs to get thousands of applications. I'm pretty confident the immigration is hitting the supply side more than demand. Most of this immigration is from low skilled workers on poverty wages, I'm struggling to see how this would massively increase demand elsewhere in the labour market.
Since immigration started increasing in the late 90's wages have been stagnant. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but hmm.
Where I'm from the shortage of supply is also due in varying proportions to: too many airbnbs and secondary residence, rural flight, families being split in multiple households, increase of average home size, etc. Immigration certainly plays a part, but likely not as much as you think.
Biggest cause is insufficient increase in supply, often due to government regulations.
Immigration can heavily increase demand, and so it can play a big part, depending on the immigration numbers. Anyone moving in needs a place to live as well.
That issue goes far beyond immigration. You want a job, especially one that has growth potential? You move to a city, regardless of if you are a native or not. You can see all the same trends in cities and countries without a lot of immigration.
Housing is also one of the few issues that is so local and immigration is such a tiny story around it to begin with. Prices are high in plenty of areas seeing little immigration activity
If the immigration is double the normal expected growth (~tripling the growth) it is not really tiny. It may very well be solvable, maybe even easily.
But the problem in many European countries is that "the left" does not even acknowledge that this may be a problem and should be solved leading to many people voting for "the far right" that does acknowledge that this is a problem.
In the US housing may not be the biggest issue, but the result is the same: the average voter can choose between "there is no problem, we can take in as many immigrant as we want forever" and "we don't want immigration".
This argument just doesn't make sense. The US annual population growth is currently 0.5%. Between 1960 and 2000 it rarely went below 1%, but since 2010 it's always been well under.
Many of the most expensive cities in the US have relatively low immigration compared to other areas with much more reasonable real estate, and it behooves you to link it where housing is expensive and immigration is very high. You have to actually provide some sources before you throw out blanket comments blaming immigrants for our problems
You’re entirely against people coming here? You’re not focused on undocumented migrants?
You’re also failing to draw a causal link here. Not to mention NYC is one of the biggest cities in the world period (10th). It’s hardly representative of most US cities.
Speaking for where I know, immigrants have been substantially higher net contributors than non-immigrants while the research on wage suppression suggests it's almost certainly not true except in some very small, very specific scenarios.
So - are population and housing costs going up and infrastructure failing to keep up, while businesses don't invest? Sure - but that's down to a failure to invest the proceeds of change, not down to the change itself.
You'll get a lot of hate for saying these things, but it's good you said them.
People really need to face reality and that our society simply cannot sustain even limited immigration if those people end up as a negative for the state in terms of financials.
Many recent US immigrants are asylum seekers. They do receive substantial government cash payments and free housing (i.e. welfare). I am generally pro immigration, but let's be clear about the cost.
Let’s also not pretend that “free housing” is NOT a major transfer of wealth from the government to landlords.
People would likely be less annoyed if the “free housing” was more akin to government owned military barracks instead of subsidized rent to private enterprise.
Your perception does not make anything a reality. Many nations commit more to immigration and welfare than the US, and are benefiting from it.
Skilled migrants bring wealth with them, and in fact countries like Australia have avoided recession through immigration (and unemployment is still around 4%).
Where I live I have the impression that cities are overcrowded because that’s where the jobs are. I don’t think immigration is the main problem, but I don’t know the actual data.
But well, immigration has to only increase. Many of the problems of the West are due to insufficient immigration. And at the present time, we don't even care much about quality. We need just "bodies": whoever is willing to come, ideally those who are likely to have lots of children (although their birthrate falls dramatically once in). Because a generation down the road, those people will run out and countries will be competing hard to get ANYONE in.
The dividing edge is if you believe a nation is a people or if a nation is a country. But if you believe a nation is a country - ie its geographical borders, then why does it even matter if people live there or not?
Since we're already treating people like cattle ("we need bodies") to be moved around at will here, then we might as well make a comparison with a cattle farmer. If his cattle are not reproducing and thus are dying out, what sensible person would suggest that the solution is to get cattle from other farmers? When is it time to ask why his cattle is dying? Is it because they deserve it? Is it because the farmer needs the milk more than the calves?
I personally want my people to survive and not join the scrolls of history on the long list of exterminated tribes. If we have to survive outside of our current geographical country in a different place, then that is preferable to extermination.
It is because they CAN. They never wanted to reproduce in the first place. And the reason isn't even the democracy or "rotten Western values" - they die off even faster in authoritarian, patriarchal Eastern countries, free and unfree alike. It's simply economic growth.
Give me any way of "making people reproduce again" which isn't overtly dystopian-totalitarian and i will accept that promoting "as much immigration as possible, not letting in only known criminals" was a bad idea.
Sure government can just start having babies for itself. That will be real cattle herding.
Huh? Who said anything about ethnically and culturally uniform?
In the US I’ve never heard this narrative from major candidates or seen it in their policy proposals from the democrats
Rhetoric is always about respecting the melting pot and letting cultural and ethnic differences co-exist under the great American experiment as it always has since its founding
> Rhetoric is always about respecting the melting pot
That is the uniform culture. You see it in tv shows everywhere, people looking the same in every show etc. (the 1 black, 1 white woman 1 white man 1 Hispanic 1 Asian group you see everywhere in American stuff)
There used to be shows like Friends and Fresh Prince which means diversity, now everything is just the gruel of the melting pot.
The general melting pot of cultures goes back over a century in this country. It’s been a cornerstone of US idealism for a long time.
It does rest that cultures will become homogeneous over time as they melt together but I take what is being asserted to be different from that, as in it’s promoting an artificial uniformity of culture rather a naturally blended one
Which the rhetoric coming from Democrats doesn't match the assertion here. It was never about forcing diversity that I can find from any fielded candidate.
Feelings being what they are, you can't really 'disprove' them per se, but this may be more of a reaction to media representations of diversity vs actual ideals
> the political left have failed to show up with an answer, a policy, a plan -- anything, really.
This is factually untrue. U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 was a legislative bill that was proposed by President Joe Biden on his first day in office.[0] It died in committee.
The reality is that illegal immigration is good for ALL business (regardless of whether you are democrat or republican) in the US. This is the hush-hush wink-wink reality that most politicians understand but would never say publicly. They create appearances they are doing something (e.g. creating legislation that might fix the problem) but knowing it won't ever pass in a partisan legislative body.
You would need to show up with data to back up those claims.
I live in (around) a major city. Sure it's overcrowded but that has nothing to do with foreign immigration and everything to do about it being a economic powerhouse.
Quality of life has been increasing since the city has invested/is investing in more transportation/bikeable lanes/better air pollution standards/less noise. Also laws that are forcing better insulation standards are a net quality of life both in terms of comfort and footing the bill. Even the people who really need to take their cars will benefit because there will less traffic jams on account of 1. people for whom it was mostly comfort leaving the road and 2. reduced speed means less unnecessary braking to get out and in the motorway around the city.
Strained services seems to be because of budget tightening. It's a policy choice that has to do with ideology (don't fund a service when it could made profitable by outsourcing it) and trying to save on budgets because of a bad economy. Again
you'd have to back up with data that it has something to do with immigration.
I could on and on but basically what you are saying there was too much new people too fast but I don't think this is nowhere true in my western european country.
The only thing that could worry is the minorities enclaves but it's not hard to break up a ghetto by opening it up sociogeographically and economically, you just need to the political will to do so but instead it's left in place and used as convenient fear-mongering tool for politicians.
The issue here is that there is a global developed world housing crisis. There was a global inflation crisis. There's no quick fixes for these problems.
Sure is. Change zoning rules to allow building a lot more. Let people and corporations build using their own money. No need for government to use any money, just change the rules. Collect property taxes from the new buildings.
No! Can’t do that, we need the money for forever wars everywhere! But the Raytheon shareholders can use the profits to add solar panels, so it’s all good.
I don't know about London but imho people would not equate the housing crisis with illegal immigration since those people can only live together in decrepit apartments when not in the streets.
It takes a billionaire funded media ecosystem (as I have in my country) to consistently hammer in the fact that those are linked in people's head.
This is the lump of labor fallacy. Adding people increases demand more than supply, meaning it increases wages. Immigrants also have complementary skills to natives, which further reduces risk.
There is no empirical evidence of anyone's wages being lowered by immigration.
That assumes immigrants are average people, but they are not they mostly work in some sectors. Those sectors will see a wage dump, other sectors might see a wage hike to compensate though.
For example if immigrants are mostly highly paid programmers, you can expect waitresses etc to get a wage hike, but if immigrants are mostly uneducated young women then waitresses will probably see reduces wages.
If you look you can see the groups who compete with the immigrants tend to be more hostile towards immigration, while the groups who doesn't see immigration in their sector aren't as hostile. Most immigrants tend to be men for example, so we would expect men to be more anti immigration since their jobs see more competition from it, and that is also what we see in opinion polling.
The first study brought in example literally has to do with low skilled worker, and as seen it does not affect other workers in a negative way (if I'm getting what the guy is saying in his post)
> Using a restricted subsample of high school dropouts and the March-CPS4, he finds a large and long lasting negative di↵erence in wages between Miami and its control in the 1982-1985 period.
The article argues that is flawed since it only considered high school dropout men, but those are the main competitors to low skill immigrant jobs. If you include women and other groups who don't compete for the same low skill jobs then yeah you wont find an effect. Some of those might even see increased wages canceling out the reduced wages low skill men see, but that doesn't really help those low skill men.
It makes sense to say that at least a slice of population gets the small stick, but if I get it right the net benefits as a whole are bigger than the singular disadvantages, or no?
The problem can be that the net whole is “better off” by some minuscule amount but certain subgroups are disastrously worse off.
For example, factory jobs disappearing usually increases the nations GDP “as a whole” but has disastrous effects on the poor communities that provided the labor.
Or another way to put it - if immigration is a net benefit and has little downsides, then a minimum wage for immigrants (legal or otherwise) of $45/hr should be fine.
(Even that might not move the needle much as immigrant labor, both legal and illegal, has “corporate” advantages that can’t be matched by residents. Being able to skirt regulations and laws because you know your employees can’t complain without risking their residency is a powerful tool. See: H1B abuse and OSHA abuse.)
Studies didn't find benefits either, it was mostly non results. More people means more people, they work and consume services at about the same rate, what matters is just how the new people distort the ratio of different kinds of people not that they are more people.
More people means there is more competition for housing until more supply is built though, so housing prices tend to go up from immigration. That is good if you wanna sell, bad if you wanna buy or rent.
Man that's one of the most surprising thing I could discover, like, ever. I've always thought that an increase in the number of workers dropped wages, and tbh the guilt has always fallen on the one who pays slave wages, not the people being paid peanuts. But that's a complete shift of paradigm, you should tell more people about it (although as he says, he probably won't change people's minds about it)
I'd rather have solidarity with other average Joes than put the guilt on them, just because they're enabling someone to pay lower wages shouldn't put the responsibility on their shoulders
Immigration is not at a historic high in us or Europe. I think it’s a combination of regressive social policy and redistribution upwards plus moderately high immigration which leaves an opportunity for populist bigots to leverage anti immigration rhetoric in elections.
5.1 million immigrants entered the EU from non-EU countries in 2022, an increase of around 117% (2.7 million) compared with 2021.
The population of Ireland alone increased by 3.5% in 2023 - a 3.5 per cent increase in population in a given year being one of the highest ever for a single country in recorded history.
Everyone in Europe has been talking about it for decades and many parties on the left have nuanced views on it, and they're certainly not ignoring it. In the US, "the wall" Trump was banging on about in 2016 already existed. Deportations under Obama were higher than under Trump, and higher still under the Clinton administration.
Secondly in many countries "the left" hasn't really been in power for a long time; often government are in the centre or centre-right.
Having better safety nets definitely helps people look outward rather than in.
Pensions, social security, healthcare; once you have a feeling that you'll be taken care of if things go bad you can think about your neighbours a little more.
The democrats shifted to the center instead of creating a campaign chasm on actual progressive issues that Americans would generally support like universal healthcare[0], student debt cancellation, housing subsidies, stronger pro labor policies (support for unions has grown across the aisle substantially) and generally fairer more equitable economic participation.
That would have reached across the aisle and put Republicans on the defensive especially around messaging
Instead, they went strong with wedge issues and tried to play culture wars. Which honestly I don’t disagree with the conclusions and policy positions democrats made here but it didn’t speak to economic fears or relief for the masses
We did this to ourselves to a certain degree. All progressives have left now is molotovs in the streets
I agree focusing on the culture issues was an incorrect move. But, union members seem to have gone largely pro-Trump even after he talked about firing anyone who went on strike and breaking them up with Musk. It's hard to understand.
> experiment of mass migration has failed to work for the average person
Could you precisely articulate this experiment ? America has had stable mass immigration for the longest time, arguably its entire history. Do you mean the entire American experiment ?
In what manner has it failed to work for the average person and in what manner has it harmed their bottom line ?
> Overcrowded cities, erosion of quality of life, strained services
American Cities are some of the most underpopulated in the whole world. Its only crowded city (NYC) has high positive sentiment for immigrants and owes the core of its historic identity to mass immigration. Not sure how immigration erodes quality of life or strains services. The US doesn't offer much in the way of services to immigrants anyway.
> competition for housing
This is 100% a building problem. The US has had high levels of immigration for a long time [1]. Immigration isn't going to suddenly shock the housing system. While the absolute population of the US keeps increasing, American cities have stayed woe-fully underbuilt. [2] New housing also isn't being built where people could use it. IE. within commute distance from offices in city centers.
> suppression of wages
Unfortunately these have been a long time coming. The alternative is jobs being shipped out of the US. The issue is even worse in Europe, where education is worse, employees work fewer hours and skill levels in new-tech are limited.
Wage suppression occurs differently in low and high skilled jobs.
In the low skill domain, the US already overpays blue collar workers, unionized factory workers and restaurant wait staff compared to the rest of the world. These jobs aren't threatened by immigrants, they're threatened by automation.
Among high skill workers, it is a statistics problem. 7.5 billion people from developing world want to be inside America's 300 million people bubble. Even with a 10x inefficiency, there will be twice as many talented people outside this bubble than inside it. So, the only way for the bubble to maintain its superiority is to keep skimming off the top. At 140k employment based green cards/year, that's 0.1% of the children born around the world that year. So even with another 10x inefficiency, the US would only allow the top 1 percentile of the whole world in.
The US wants this top talent. Because at their caliber, they are going to outcompete the US, and fundamentally alter unipolar power structures that give US its modern form. We're already seeing this with China. Now that the US has stopped having the same appeal to top Chinese candidates, Chinese geniuses now build within China, eroding America's control in every industry, one at a time. Eg: The world's best AI institutions are all Chinese [3]. The institutions didn't improve that much. It's just that America stopped being able to poach their best away.
Wages WILL be suppressed. The competition free utopia of the Boomers and Gen-Xers was only possible because the US emerged as sole superpower of the 20th century, while Asia rebuilt from scratch. Now that the world is stabilizing again, American wages can't hold up to scrutiny from the rest of world.
> the complete abandonment of on-the-job training, falling tertiary education standards
Not sure what immigration has to do with any of this.
> I don't know how bad it is in the US, but in the rest of the West, it's been a disaster.
If you're talking about Canada and Europe, that's a whole another story. Yes, their mass immigration programs have been unmitigated disasters. But, you can't plainly extrapolate that to the US. The specifics matter. On that note, I wish you were more specific about what kind of immigration ?
There’s a simple argument - the USA can obviously support some level of immigration - at the bare minimum the difference between current births and the replacement birth rate - and just as obviously it can’t stably take in half a billion people a year. Somewhere in between there must be a gradual cutoff where it becomes “too much”.
Most opponents of immigration say we’ve passed that mark and either need to compensate to solve the issues caused by it, or dial the number back.
> Somewhere in between there must be a gradual cutoff where it becomes “too much”.
There's a huge range of dimensions beyond how many people: Who is allowed to immigrate? How long do they get to stay? Do their children become citizens? etc.
Fantastic comment. I wish we could've had more open discussions about specific factual details over the past four years. I'm not a fan of "both-sides"-ism, but it there are definitely plenty of uncomfortable truths to go around for everyone.
Migrants are how people are fed and how many esential jobs are filled. They aren't the problem, even illegal immigration are blips (although massive wars have put huge pressures on countries) and are only set to get worse with climate change.
The root causes of the issues are war, climate change and demographics. No amount of "battening down the hatches" or "sticking your head in the sand", which is right wing answers to this, are going to solve it. The real solutions are strengthening global co-operation and international agencies.
Unfortunately we're going in exactly the wrong direction.
Correlation != causation, yet again for billionth time even otherwise smart folks easily do this mistake, usually emotions cloud their rationality. There is 0 proof as in any form of research that proves what you claim, you don't even try to back it up.
All this boils again to emotions - people see french teacher having head cut off by student due to showing muhammad's picture in the class, and this trumps 1000s other data points and discussions. I am not saying such things should be ignored or swept under the carpet, but analyzed rationally, discussed and good measures taken, even very harsh if they are the best course of action. Simple folks don't want to hear arguments, they want to see blood and whole world to fix their lives so they can live like some tiktokers they follow en masse.
For Europe, yet again Switzerland is doing stuff 1000x better than rest of the continent. They have 3x the immigration of average western EU country, yet 0.1% problems with it. But its population is smarter and less emotionally driven, so populists have it much harder here. Also they as society setup the whole immigration as set of rules as expectations that everybody +-adheres to. But EU has too big egos to actually admit somebody is better and just learn from more successful, so they will keep fucking things up till people are so pissed they will vote for people who will do further long term damage but will tackle scary immigration boogeyman.
Now its really not a good time for democracies that don't have well educated smart self-sufficient population, dictators are coming better off.
>For Europe, yet again Switzerland is doing stuff 1000x better than rest of the continent.
Well, being the continent's money vault and avoiding two world wars while the whole continent ravaged itself twice, tends to make a huge difference in your nation's development (time in the market beats timing the market and Switzerland did both).
Also, just like the USA, Switzerland won the geopolitical lottery early on by being in a position that's easy to defend and difficult to attack and capitalized on it over the decades by attracting the highly educated elite and the wealthy entrepreneurs escaping from the European countries as they were torn by wars and revolutions, plus the dirty money of warlords, dictators and criminals from all over the world made them incredibly prosperous. It's not a repeatable formula that any other EU country could have easily replicated.
Adding the fact that Switzerland is incredibly restrictive with who they accept in the country, compared to neighboring EU countries who just let the dross in to virtue signal how tolerant they are, maintains Switzerland a very safe and desirable place to be despite it being relatively diverse (diversity in this context also means diversity of thought and diversity of opinion, not just the US identity politics version of only meaning non straight white males). So another win for them.
But if you look at Swiss elections, plenty of candidates took the xenophobic route in their campaigns demonizing Muslims and burkas as the biggest threat, but unlike EU members they don't really care what other think of them so they're a lot more outspoken about it.[1][2]
I mostly agree with you. Since Nicola Machiavelli, it still holds true - Swiss are most free (and most armed, that may be true just within Europe now) nation in the world, so they just express opinions that are anyway held all across the continent, even much more in the east.
Just one nitpick - people love bashing swiss banking and relation to money laundering and nazis. If you check the numbers, this had absolutely minimal effect on economy, even now banks together form cca 10% of the economy, tourism has bigger impact. Plus its a profit kept within corporations who dont pay massive taxes back to state, so there are some benefits but its overblown, but makes easy blaming mental shortcut. Emotions emotions...
And I stand by the fact most of swiss success could be easily repeated in ie Germany or France, they have the competence, if they were setup differently and folks had slightly different mindset. Its no magic, just few extra rules and responsibilities. But no they have to have overblown easy to abuse social state, high taxes. Of course this doesnt work well. Again swiss have by far the best and most sustainable/resilient model in this, good health and social systems, yet low taxes and state basically doesnt have deficits
Back then the right wing were the industrialists who wanted immigration.
Hitler blamed all sorts of people, including the socialists (who were against immigration). Using Hitler to shut down any discussion about immigration is not very productive. Obviously there are limits. Less so in the U.S. because there is more space, but in Europe everyone is already living in tiny overpriced apartments on top of each other.
That's really a quite very unrefined view of Hitler's rise to power. If you really want to prevent Hitler then you have to prevent the end-stage of the Weimar Republic. So, you'd need a strong economy, rule of law, public order and a culture of decency and trust. What makes people yearn for autocratic rule isn't "blaming the jews" it's the everyday circumstances that arise when liberals are done running a place into the ground. Like California, at the moment.
>it's the everyday circumstances that arise when liberals are done running a place into the ground.
Not just running the place into the ground, but also actively lecturing people how everything is fine and how it's their perception that is wrong. That's what really pisses people off and gets the to vote extremists as those tend to at least acknowledge some of the issues average people are facing or seeing.
Average working class people don't like being lectured by upper class higher educated elitists off their high horse on how they're wrong.
This is idiotic. People who live in California just voted Harris. Their quality of life is fine. The irony is that it’s the redneck parts of the states that are suffering most from neoliberal austerity.
It's just the same playbook. Deny problems, divert blame, call opponents bad names.
IF you were so interested in preventing the next Hitler what you would actually have to do is to rigorously oppose anything that threatens the livelihood of average people. Fighting inflation would be THE number one concern because you'd know that people carrying their money in wheelbarrows was what caused Hitler.
If you want to prevent Hitler, you'd fight like hell for decency. Homeless encampments? Open air drug dens? Only-fans? This would be your concern because you'd know that in the Weimar Republic rampant prostitution and other cultural decay is what caused Hitler.
If you wanted to prevent Hitler you'd also speak out sternly against Antifa and other violent extreme leftists, like those that caused the George Floyd riots, because you'd know that the breakdown of public order due to rampant political violence in the Weimar Republic is what caused Hitler.
Nobody on the left is doing any of that because nobody on the left really thinks Trump is a Nazi. It's just a label, just a tactic. And all it has done is to burn term. Trump or Maga or the current right reaction isn't the big bad. What comes after this might be, if Trump fails. Ironically, it's exactly Trump's agenda which is most suited to fight real fascism.
Exactly what should government do to fight global inflation largely
Caused by fuel prices? Perhaps try to decarbonise… but that’s not very MAGA is it? The reality is inflation is lower in the US than much of the rest of the world and the US economy has weathered recent shocks better than most.
"Fix everything or else we'll elect Hitler" well they certainly can't fix everything so I guess they might as well resign themselves to having Hitler elected. Why even bother trying in that case?
That is going to be explosive because there isn't a developed economy anywhere that can avoid major crises without maintaining or increasing immigration levels over the coming decades as the effects of fertility rates really start to bite.
In the UK we saw the Tories try to play the ball in two places at once: Enable lots of immigration while simultaneously pretending the country was under siege to appeal to the anti-immigrant crowd. It blew up in their faces in a spectacular way.
While I'd like that to be an accurate description of why the Tory party lost, my understanding is that the migration topic was basically the only thing the Tories did that continued to resonate with voters, and what actually lost them was a continuing series of incompetent leaders, starting with Cameron (who didn't realise the mic was still hot immediately after resigning). Nobody (of any party) liked May, Johnson got away with pleasing lies until Partygate, Truss was a forgettable joke, and Sunak was basically Jim Hacker.
IMO the only reason the Tories didn't lose sooner was that the Labour party was also stuck with Corbyn.
They lost the anti-immigration vote to Reform. That shows, to me, that the voters that cared about that topic could see the difference between their rhetoric and their actions.
Reform gutted the Tory party largely on anger over immigration the Tory party itself whipped up.
Their incredibly incompetent string of PMs didn't help, but without Reform spoiling, they'd at least still have had a shot.
Note how Labour didn't win this as much as the Tories lost it: Starmer got fewer votes than Corbyn. Starmer failed to attract more voters despite running against the most ridiculed government in modern British history. People didn't want Starmer, they wanted not-Tories, and on the right that meant voters fleeing to the anti immigrant Reform.
As a person who can be described that way: why would I want to migrate to any country whose leaders were elected on a platform of hating migrants?
"Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
>why would I want to migrate to any country whose leaders were elected on a platform of hating migrants?
Well, for one: cutting back on illegal immigrants and hating immigrants are not the same thing.
Two: stay where you are? I don't get what your expectations are here. Plenty of skilled immigrants love the US. If it's not your cup of tea, that's fine.
1. Illegal immigration is already illegal. Cutting back on it is tangential to every other statement about promoting, limiting, or targeting migration.
2. I'm responding to a comment that says "How about door 3: only allow immigration for skilled individuals capable of adding outsized value to our economy?"
And in my capacity as such a person: that attitude makes me not interested in anything else on the table. Hypothetically to demonstrate the point: You could offer me your entire GDP, even after accounting for a business plan where I somehow specifically help you double it, as pay… and I'd turn you down.
Remember that the current state of immigration in the USA is exactly what was being proposed to be changed: the previous desirability is specifically not going to remain.
> "Hating migrants" != "want only the migrants that pull their own weight"
"Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
> Why would you personally want to immigrate to a place where you are immediately expected to foot the bill for everyone else?
Because the only places that doesn't describe are those without a functioning government capable of collecting taxes.
You want me to migrate to ${your country} to boost the economy? Well, that's only useful to you to the extent it means I'm supporting all the people in your country that can't migrate elsewhere for exactly the same reason.
> "Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!"
I want to live with people who pull their weight and aren't an immediate financial burden on everyone else, yes.
If this is "one of the good ones" vs "one of the bad," so be it. If one is immediately looking to burden everyone else, I can see why one wouldn't want to "spend [their] time living with" folks who don't want to give them free shit.
> Because the only places that doesn't describe are those without a functioning government capable of collecting taxes.
We're not talking about tax collection, we're talking about how taxes are spent.
> You want me to migrate to ${your country} to boost the economy?
I don't care why or if you immigrate, but if you do, you will not have a net-negative financial impact on the population. Yes: there are freeloaders amongst the population as-is - this itself isn't a valid reason to import millions more.
We're already taking the cream of the crop - which is why H-1B and O-1s visas are a thing. People hiking across the Darién gap aren't magically going to become engineers and doctors.
> We're not talking about tax collection, we're talking about how taxes are spent.
You're doing both.
In every functioning nation, the rich subsidise the poor.
I as an above average income earner am necessarily always going to subside the poor no matter where I live — unless it's a place that's got no government.
That was true when I lived in the UK, true when I moved to Germany, and would have been true had I moved to the USA instead — all that changed for me was Joe Bloggs became Otto Normalverbraucher instead of Bubba Sixpack.
> I don't care why or if you immigrate, but if you do
Except you previously wrote "How about door 3: only allow immigration for skilled individuals capable of adding outsized value to our economy?"
If you "allow" something but nobody wants to take you up on it, it's not any different than forbidding it.
I'm allowing people to donate infinite money to me, but I'm not taking any steps to encourage this or give anyone a reason to.
> People hiking across the Darién gap aren't magically going to become engineers and doctors
Likewise a degree.
In both cases the capability is already a demonstration of being well above average.
>"Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
This entire thread is filled to the brim with people describing the voting majority of Republicans as low information idiots.
We can't have unrestricted immigration, period. How do you propose we select?
I wrote both with the intention of inducing empathy, as in putting oneself in the shoes of others.
> We can't have unrestricted immigration, period.
False.
In many threads where the US is compared unfavourable to other nations, e.g. that the public transport isn't as good or as cheap as Germany's, or that internet is slower and more expensive than France, or whatever, the defence is "oh, America is just so big and empty".
You have the most part of a continent. You could, if you wanted to, fit in the whole world — about twice the population density of the Netherlands, which I've been to and isn't that crowded.
And it's not like everyone actually wants to live in any given country anyway — even if you did have the whole world suddenly teleport in and leave the rest of the planet empty like an xkcd what-if, I'd be surprised if less than 80% put in active effort to leave.
> "Oh but not like you, you're one of the good ones!" - imagine yourself being described that way, and ask if that's a crowd you care to spend your time living with.
That is how the left describe men, do you argue the left hates men?
I have yet to encounter anyone saying that, and I live in a country which (and come from another country which also) considers the US' Democrat Party to be suspiciously right-wing.
But hypothetically, if I met someone saying that, I would indeed say that specific person hated men.
They definitely would not be someone I would wish to constantly be treading egg-shells around for fear of getting deported.
> "Hating migrants" != "want only the migrants that pull their own weight"
As a foreigner, I honestly can't see the difference between "want only the migrants that pull their own weight" and "hate foreigners but refrain from saying it to their face if there's a financial incentive".
If your tolerance is predicated on me giving you money, I'll pass the opportunity.
Why can't I want to minimize the number of unskilled outsiders (with different values, etc.) because they may cost more while overlooking that fact for those with obvious economic power regardless of where they are from.
I know it hurts to hear: people with wealth are desirable guests and citizens.
A country's citizenry is much like children: some are going to be shitty, but we still support that limited group because of arbitrary moral obligation (perhaps inspired by the fact that we want our "own" to continue.) We're not obligated to extend this tradition to anyone else for any reason.
> you still won't get me spending the money I earn on your economy so you won't get rich from me.
Thankfully there are billions of people in the world and they're literally dying to get into the US. H-1Bs quotas are filled every year - there's no shortage of high-average earners wanting to come here, either.
Studies show you've got it backwards. If you let a nurse or programmer into the country, they're going to take a job that's otherwise filled by an American, depressing skilled wages.
If you let in an unskilled laborer, they're going to take a job that nobody wants. They spend those wages, boosting the economy.
In both cases, studies show that the number of jobs stays roughly the same; immigrants create about the same amount of jobs as they take. However skilled immigrants decrease average wages, and unskilled immigrants increase average wages.
It's the outliers that really tip the balance, though. If one of those immigrants turns out to be Jensen Huang or his parents, that's how you make America great.
> Studies show you've got it backwards. If you let a nurse or programmer into the country, they're going to take a job that's otherwise filled by an American, depressing skilled wages.
But at that same time they're contributing massive amounts to the tax base, furthering society.
Maybe they even start a company, employing more programmers.
They also spend their wages.
> If you let in an unskilled laborer, they're going to take a job that nobody wants.
The price for that work is artificially low because these folks don't have any legal protections of any kind.
Guess what else happens commonly to unskilled, under-the-table labor? Injuries! Which I have to pay an outsized amount for in the form of Medicaid and ER fees.
How much of their remaining income is remitted straight to their impoverished relatives back home?
> If one of those immigrants turns out to be Jensen Huang or his parents
Know how to easily filter out Jensen Huang from the crowd of people swimming across the Rio Grande? Marketable skills.
> How much of their remaining income is remitted straight to their impoverished relatives back home?
The skilled labourers do far more of that than unskilled ones.
> Guess what else happens commonly to unskilled, under-the-table labor? Injuries! Which I have to pay an outsized amount for in the form of Medicaid and ER fees.
The vast majority of the cost of health care is old people, and it's expensive because it's labor intensive. The way to bring health care costs down is to increase the ratio of young people to old people. Which in 2024 means immigration.
> Know how to easily filter out Jensen Huang from the crowd of people swimming across the Rio Grande? Marketable skills.
Marketable skills like shopkeeper? That's what Jensen Huang's parents were.
> The vast majority of the cost of health care is old people
Chronic costs, yes, costs borne out of tail risks - no.
> Marketable skills like shopkeeper? That's what Jensen Huang's parents were.
If you have the drive, economic ability, wherewithal in 2024 to keep a shop - operate a business - in the United States in 2024, yes, this is a desirable, marketable skill.
> Chronic costs, yes, costs borne out of tail risks - no.
Chronic costs are the vast majority of total costs
> If you have the drive, economic ability, wherewithal in 2024 to keep a shop - operate a business - in the United States in 2024, yes, this is a desirable, marketable skill.
That's a priori data. Jensen's parents weren't shopkeepers in Taiwan, so how would you know this?
Lord help your soul though if you are a citizen and do not have the ability to work a high level job.
There are an enormous number of unskilled workers in the US. And they get a vote. And they will vote to kill off competition from migrant workers. Like what trump is promising.
> that skilled citizen can no doubt find some other work.
at a much lower salary, sure.
> But the unskilled citizen labor that gets pushed aside by unskilled immigration - they have a much harder time finding work.
No they don't, not according to studies. Studies show that immigration increases the number of total jobs available. There are fewer available jobs for janitors, but more available jobs where just being a local is a marketable skill. A local has language and cultural skills that immigrants don't have.
So they're less likely to find work as a janitor but more likely to find one as a waiter or retail manager, both higher paying positions.
You can't get native Americans to do farm work for any amount of money, because they'd have to live in the middle of nowhere near the farm and that's no fun.
(That is, you'd have to pay them so much they could buy the farm and then hire someone else to work it. But you're not going to do that.)
No, it's called a famine and wouldn't happen. Recession would imply that the market was completely incapable of adjusting to allocate resources correctly.
Promoting a second-tier, legally-disenfranchised workforce isn't the win you seem to think it is.
> Recession would imply that the market was completely incapable of adjusting to allocate resources correctly.
It doesn't have to be "complete", just a shortfall in demand, and of course eventually it ends. But if the market doesn't clear for a while, that's still people having to eat less for a while.
> Promoting a second-tier, legally-disenfranchised workforce isn't the win you seem to think it is.
Almost everything is better than farm work, which is why everyone ditches it as fast as they can. Even being a sweatshop worker is better. Nevertheless, the migrant farmworkers are doing it because it's better than their alternatives, presumably because they get paid better than doing it in their own country.
Btw, I'm not even thinking of especially poor countries here. Japan is a respectable first-world country but has surprisingly low wages and a bad exchange rate, and there are recent cases of Japanese people leaving for Australia to do work like this and making 2-3x what they can at home.
And of course back in Japan it feels like every convenience store worker these days is an immigrant from China, India or elsewhere.
This is fine, really. Productivity will increase over time, they'll save money over time, and their kids will have better jobs.
You missed what's actually happening, which is that cheap workers don't need to migrate to you to get unskilled work done for you.
The jobs move to distant factories filled with alien staff paying taxes to far away governments and who then spend their wages where they live (which isn't where you live).
Even with tariffs, that's still cheaper for many things. And the work you're incentivising to bring to you with tariffs, that's often automated precisely because it's unskilled. Food has been increasingly automated at least since the 1750s — to the extent that cows milk themselves (into machines not just into calves) these days.
It works until it doesn't — wherever the jobs go gets a rising economic spiral, and a generation later their middle class is corresponding richer and say to each other much what you say now: "why do we need them?", only now you are a "them" in that discussion.
It's a weird thing, migration. The short term incentives absolutely favour it for everyone, but it's bad for the place of origin in the long-term.
But note that I didn't say international migration: the arguments are the same between San Francisco and Sacremento, or between Lampeter and Cardiff, or between Marzahn and Zehlendorf.
Japan is way ahead of the west in falling birthrates, but in spite of very little immigration there hasn't been any major crisis, just gradually declining standards of living.
"Just" a slow collapse of society in other words. How many places do you see people putting up with that without electing increasingly extreme politicians? And even Japan is nowhere near experiencing the worst of it - their population size is still near its peak.
> coming decades as the effects of fertility rates really start to bite.
I mean one solution is to promote policies that encourage people to have more children, but we "can't afford it", expecting we'll be able to afford the incoming social care crisis.
Collapsing healthcare and pension systems, and massively rising taxes to account for a reclining tax base as the proportion of people working drops. Critical positions becoming harder and harder to fill, and industries fleeing to places they can hire labor.
Less Taxes: So we would have a smaller government? That's good. Government already gets so much money and waste it.
Pensions: Maybe instead of relying on a pyramid scheme, people would need to manage their investments or have kids and raise them well so they take care of them later. Sounds like a win.
Less tax revenue. Higher tax rates to try to compensate to prevent collapse.
As for pensions, arguing about what should be is not going to help the growing proportion of your population that don't have enough or that will end up having to try to help their parents and grandparents avoid destitution.
Even if people "managed their investments", with fewer and fewer working age people relative to the total population, if everyone reduced their spending to invest for their pensions, yields will drop as demand gets taken away for people to save instead of spend.
The result is a combination of all these factors and many others, including racism, misogyny, and a desire to return to a time when groceries were cheap. Next summer, the recession will come as a great surprise to those who expected to be better off under Trump
All the libertarian mumbojumbo about the internet and encryption prove to be wrong. The internet becomes a tool of mass surveillance and misinformation affording the oligarchic takeover and dissolution of democracy and broad based freedoms.
Or maybe, just maybe, the Democrats (and other similar parties elsewhere) went too crazy and left and did not focus on real issues ordinary people face?
When people say this, they just seem to mean European countries have more universal healthcare than the US does. But /keeping/ your healthcare program after it's already been invented is conservative!
European parties are definitely not to the left of the Democrats on immigration or minority rights.
Very much depends on the issue being discussed. Economically? Perhaps. Socially? Absolutely not. The US is far out on its own branch when it comes to things like LGBTQ issues, racial and other identity issues, immigration, etc. I’m not sure these played as much of a role as the economy in terms of this election, but they are absolutely next in line in terms of the issues looming large in voters’ minds.
Considering that our far right government in italy hiked taxes and approved the biggest number of visa for slave workers, yeah they do except for women's rights
Women who are otherwise going to die because of a medical condition might want to have an abortion at 9 months (for example). The idea of being "for abortion at 9 months" just means allowing those women to live (instead of having to have their babies whether or not it kills them).
These, and a lot of other things are pretty much randomly left/right. For example in the UK it was the traditionally right wing party that legalised same sex marriage. In the 70s the left (then actual socialists!) opposed EEC membership, by the time we left the EU it was the right who wanted to leave.
What the US never had (and which is pretty much dead in the UK now) is a real economically left wing party. In the UK this has lead to a lot of people (including myself) feeling that there is not much difference between the big parties. This helps for extreme parties in the UK. In the US which is more of a two party system perhaps it helps feed the rise of extreme movements within the existing parties?
And yeah, politics are a lot more complex than left/right so you will often see a party you'd normally consider left/right enact a policy you'd see from the other side.
How so? Only because we say so now. TO some extent I think we identify issues as social liberal because they are what the left in the US favours.
There are plenty of examples of let wing parties and governments being quite the opposite - take a look at gay rights in communist China or the toing and froing in the Soviet Union. The same with many traditional socialists around the world.
Those are not left policies. Just liberal. We have both left and right parties that have similar policies. We also have left and right parties that area against it.
We just had by far the most pro-union administration in decades, eg they saved the Teamsters' pensions, and in return the Teamsters didn't endorse them. Americans don't care if you respect the working class or not, they're postmaterialist voters.
But they're also "education polarized", so they definitely care if you respect people who didn't go to college. But "respect" doesn't mean you're nice to them or even that you do things for them as a group. It could just mean you don't come off like you went to grad school.
Grocery union workers were hassling people to see their prescriptions where I live recently, before they’d let them in the store as pharmacy workers had a different contract
More local tribal groups who can ask for your papers “please” is not the way either. Unions have aligned with mafioso and pols to propagate violence. Not sure why everyone thinks the past is a good solution. Clearly the average American is a moron; who rewards them with more authority?
Dem pols are 100% useless as any real change screws them too as people. It’s pageantry on both sides. Ones just openly violent and that one won. Great.
It's more that their marketing targeted people who are already Democrats and moderate Republicans. The first group didn't need convincing, and the second group is small. The independents and swing voters they should have courted were left in the cold and either didn't vote or went for Trump. They kept preaching to choir, and the choir kept shouting "Hallelujah!", so they thought they had it in the bag.
>Defending trans people apparently was a bridge too far for many, for one.
Which is ridiculous. Trans folks are less than one percent of the population.
Why shouldn't they be allowed to be who they are? Given the tiny number of these folks, it really shouldn't make any difference to anyone who's not trans anyway.
But, apparently, some folks, who appear to believe that their trained-in prejudices are the laws of nature, feel the need to tell other people how they should live and, even more egregiously, try to force them to do so.
That's not liberty. That's not individual rights. That's not religious freedom. Rather, it's busybodies trying to tell other people what to do.
The only reason this could happen is because of policy that prioritizes self-declared "gender identity" over sex, and over women's dignity and safety. That's the actual problem, not people just quietly living their lives.
There's 2x the amount of border apprehensions under Biden than Trump. I'm sure more people are trying to get into the country under Biden than trump so let's say the control is pretty even but not uncontrolled.
The number of border apprehensions is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the number of illegals who enter the country. If 0 illegal immigrants enter the country that would mean there are 0 border apprehensions. Would that mean the border was less secured?
Everything indicates there were less illegal border crossings under Trump than Biden
It also boggles the mind that immigrants are the issue while the 1% own as much as the entire middle class, while the bottom class owns nothing at all. When you pay more for groceries, or rent, or gas do you think it's the immigrants making it expensive?
You are sounding a bit demeaning. Do you really think people are only capable of caring about one issue?
Regardless, immigration can harm the poor by having increased competition for low paying jobs. Bernie Sanders called open borders a Koch brothers plan to get cheap labor.
This is especially true of illegal immigration since they will naturally be paid less because there is a legal risk.
I'm concerned about this "group paranoia" phenomenon that I increasingly see among friends and family. Yes, just like in the past it was the Devil himself manipulating kings and people, now it is China and Russia that secretly hold sway over Western governments (when it's not the Jews).
