The issue of the border and migration is a politically charged issue. Republicans have seized upon it as one of the few concrete issues that they think can help them win elections, since their other issues involve culture wars that do not seem to have gained much traction. So desperate are they to keep this issue alive that the speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson, urged on by serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), has promised to torpedo a bipartisan plan negotiated by Republicans and Democrats in the Senate to deal with the border issue, so that it will not be resolved before the election, even though the plan seems to give hard-line Republicans almost every thing that they had demanded.
Opponents to any attempt to deal with the border issues have exploited the xenophobia that is always lurking in the minds of people to view anything other that harsh exclusionary treatment of those seeking asylum as constituting an ‘open borders’ policy that will destroy the US. This xenophobia is laced with racism since the immigrants they are concerned about stopping are people of color, while SSAT has bemoaned that they are not people from Europe who would no doubt be welcomed into the country.
As John Cassidy writes, the US needs immigrants, especially young ones, if its demographic spectrum does not get skewed too much towards old people, as is also happening in countries like Japan and China.
Demographers and economists have been warning that the aging baby-boomer population presents a serious challenge to the nation’s finances, as the ratio of seniors to working-age adults – the age-dependency ratio – rises. The reason is straightforward: Social Security and Medicare are largely financed on a pay-as-you-go basis, which means that some of the taxes paid by current workers are transferred to current retirees. If the dependency ratio rises, the financial burden on the working-age population also increases.
A front-page piece in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal pointed out that this problem was contained for a long time because the age-dependency ratio remained relatively steady. In 1980, there were nineteen Americans age sixty-five or older for every hundred Americans between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four. The dependency ratio was nineteen per cent. By 2010, it crept up to twenty-one per cent, an increase of just two percentage points in thirty years.
But the end of 2010 marked an important threshold. In 2011, the first members of the baby-boom generation (people born between 1946 and 1964) turned sixty-five. By 2017, the age-dependency ratio had risen to twenty-five per cent—an increase of four percentage points in just seven years. In the coming decades, it is expected to rise even more sharply. By 2030, “the ratio would climb to 35 retiree-age Americans for every 100 of working age . . . and 42 by 2060,” the Journal story said, citing projections released earlier this year.
…The final option is to welcome more immigrants, particularly younger immigrants, so that, in the coming decades, they and their descendants will find work and contribute to the tax base. Almost all economists agree that immigration raises G.D.P. and stimulates business development by increasing the supply of workers and entrepreneurs. There is some disagreement about the net fiscal impact of first-generation migrants. The argument is that they tend to be less educated and therefore earn lower wages than the native population, and that they tend to contribute less in taxes. But this is disputed. There is no doubt about the contribution that immigrant families make over the longer term, however.
“Second-generation adults – the children of immigrants – had, on average, a more favorable net fiscal impact for all government levels combined than either first-generation immigrants or the rest of the native-born population,” a study of the period from 1994-2013 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, published in 2016, pointed out. “Reflecting their slightly higher educational achievement, as well as their higher wages and salaries, the second generation contributed more in taxes on a per capita basis during working ages than did their parents or other native-born Americans.”
In the long run, welcoming immigrants is a good investment for the United States. The entire history of the country demonstrates this fact.
Apart from the actual bill and the politics involved, I have been thinking about what kind of immigrants the US should let in. There are plenty of young immigrants and their families who are trying to get across the southern border. The problem is that these people have been characterized by SSAT, notably in his announcement as a candidate is 2015, as terrible people, rapists, murderers, drug dealers, and other types of undesirables and that we should fear them, and this view has permeated through society. He has continued to demagogue on this issue. Any large group of people will have such people among them but there seems little or no evidence that they constitute a significant portion. Instead, they seem to be mostly poor people fleeing persecution and poverty, and claiming asylum in the US is seen by them as the only hope for themselves and their children for a better future, so much so that they are willing to make a highly dangerous journey that has low probability of success.
It has been argued by some that even though these people are seeking a better and safer life, they should go through the ‘proper channels’ and get in line with all the others who seek to immigrate. Those (like me) who did come here like that know that it is an bureaucratically arduous process, where you have to show that you are ‘worthy’ in some way, by virtue of having special knowledge or skills (or lots of money) that are needed here. It is tempting for people like us to resent those who seem (at least in our eyes) to be trying to take shortcuts that we did not take, and for us to join with those who dismiss those poor people who lack much education or special skills as likely to be a drain on society and thus deserve to be kept out.
But is that true? I have long been doubtful of that thesis. I was struck by this poignant photograph of what looks like a father and son braving a river to get to the US, with the child having such great trust in the father to get across safely, because it captured something that I had been thinking about.
I cannot imagine myself being so desperate to do something like that. It seems to me that people who would take such risks with their families and leave their home country to get to a far away place that is so different in the hope of making a better life for their children, rather than doing this as an easy short cut, must have some truly admirable qualities, such as ambition, courage, and perseverance. The idea that after arriving here, such people would just do nothing or become criminals strikes me as implausible, unless they are treated so badly that they are forced into it because they are left with no other options. If they are given work permits, they are likely to be industrious and strive to succeed, like almost all immigrants, because of the desire to prove to themselves, their families, and those they left behind that the massive risk they took in leaving their homelands was worth it.
I do not know what the solution to the immigration issue is. But it might help to start looking on the people who are trying to cross the border without proper documentation as potential assets to this country instead of viewing them as liabilities or fearing them as threats.
For a thoughtful discussion of the issue of immigration at the southern boarder and its evolution in the 21st century, I can recommend this 28-minute podcast between Brooke Gladstone (host of On the Media) and Jonathan Blitzer.
Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker covering immigration. He’s observed that the last three American presidents have each faced a humanitarian emergency at the southern border – in 2014, 2019, and 2021 – but each of these crises is experienced by the American public as a separate, unrelated incident. In his new book Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, he traces the broader historical and geopolitical root causes of the unique moment of mass migration to the United States that we’re witnessing today. Brooke speaks with Blitzer about how the causes of the mass migration to the United States from Central America over the past decade stem back to the 1980s and the Cold War.
My thought exactly, the type of person willing to take the horrendous risks in flee to the US/Canada/Europe are exactly the type of people that will make a positive contribution to their new host country.
And it is truly ironic that the age demographic (older than 64) that needs this influx of skilled talent the most in order to support them after they stop working are the ones that most actively work against allowing these refugees entry.
Steve Oberski @ 1
A comment from Sweden: refugees from Afghanistan -especially teenage boys arriving on their own- were demonised in Swedish media during the refugee chrisis, but as things have settled down the young boys and teenagers coming from Afghanistan are among the most successful immigrants!
If you ask Stephen Miller or Steve Nannon they will say you should admit Austrian males, preferably art-school rejects.
Typo. Should be Bannon. I blame the [people descended from the Levant]…
The answer to the headline used to be:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
When SSAT gets re-elected, he will order the Statue of Liberty pulled down.
What kind of immigrants should the US admit?
Silly peacepussy, that’s easy: White European diehard anti-communists who share Republicans’ hatred of liberals, socialists, feminists and non-Orthodox-Christians, equate all of those with Stalinism, expect America to be what they saw in Western movies, and diligently work their way to Model Minority status by attacking and scapegoating darker-skinned immigrants for all the misery brought on Americans by backward bigoted nativist reactionary policies.
Any more questions? Didn’t think so.
@5 Lassi Hippeläinen
Prophesized in season 3 of “The Man in the High Castle”.
Seem like our future is being charted by dystopian series like “The Handmaids Tale”.
I recall back when SSAT lamented that we didn’t have more immigrants from…Norway. Someone did some research and found that on average, immigrants from Africa were more educated than those from Norway. I’m sure these people want more Africans, right?
I also recall data which show that immigrants commit fewer crimes than other US citizens.
Borders, as a feature of nationalism, are a crime against humanity. Nobody should respect borders, period.
I also recall data which show that immigrants commit fewer crimes than other US citizens
No immigrant has ever tried to steal the presidency, QED
We should take anyone who wants to be an American. Makes no sense to discriminate based on country of origin, age, sex, gender, orientation, disability, etc.
From the outset let me state that I’m in favour of controlled immigration, that immigrants are not merely a statistical/demographic necessity for the continued economic health of the US, the UK, and most other developed nations, but that I think they’re a desirable addition to the existing culture. That having been clearly said:
On its face this is self-evidently ridiculous as a starting point.
First point: in theory that’s nice, but if you experienced a sudden influx of immigrants from e.g. Iran or Russia or North Korea, then what? Just wave them in? Do you not national security at all? You won’t discriminate on age? Anyone, no matter how old, infirm and dependent on social services they are just gets to come in and be an immediate financial burden on society with no prospect of ever making a contribution? That doesn’t make much sense.
Obviously sex/gender/orientation/disability should not be grounds to reject, nor should race or political persuasion.
Which leads on to the obvious question, once you’ve accepted that “take anyone” is self-evidently stupid: who does get turned away?
I’m just going to name a few British celebrities past and present, and I’d like you to picture them rocking up at the immigration desk, and let me know how happy you’d be at letting them in (google them if you have to):
-- DJ and television presenter Jimmy Savile
-- glam rocker Gary Glitter, aka Paul Gadd
-- publicist Max Clifford
-- Liberal party MP Cyril Smith
The point being: there is surely a list of things someone might do that would make it reasonable to reject their request to settle in your country, isn’t there? The real questions are what are those things, and how much effort do you put into determining whether any given person has done any of those things?
“obviously”
Marcus Ranum #9
First Nations people in Canada and Indians in USA have a centuries-long disrespect of the Invaders’ Borders.
Especially, sorta recently, involving Tobacco.
@sonofrojblake 12,
Your comment is so logically vacuous that I’m actually baffled by it.
If the logic of WMDKitty’s statement is “self-evidently ridiculous,” then it wouldn’t be necessary to argue against it, right? And yet you proceed to lay out arguments, which I guess is a good thing, because I don’t see anything “self-evidently” wrong with WMDKitty’s argument.
But your arguments are absurd, logically incomplete, ignorant of reality, or simply inhumane.
Let’s start with:
Well this is just straight up xenophobia. A person can no more help their national origin than they can help their sex/gender/orientation/disability status.
How is national security relevant? The US has espionage laws. They don’t disallow immigrants or refugees. We currently do allow immigrants from Russia and Iran, and North Koreans are also allowed as refugees, although the number is small. Nation of origin currently isn’t a valid reason to disallow immigration, so why do you think that the mere existence of Iranians and Russians makes WMDKitty’s position “ridiculous?”
Then you say:
Oy fucking vey.
Access to social services shouldn’t depend on not being a “financial burden … with no prospect of ever making a contribution.” I can’t believe I actually have to make this argument on this website, but here we are.
We shouldn’t cut people from social services just because they’re not financially profitable, and I think that’s true regardless of where they were born. I actually can’t imagine holding any contrary opinion on the matter. Your argument seems inhuman to me.
But it’s also, again, ignorant of reality, where old people are currently allowed as immigrants. Retirees immigrating to the US have to demonstrate a certain level of financial security, but I’m not convinced that that’s a reasonable requirement. In the US, a retiree can only access social security or Medicare benefits after working for a number of years, so it isn’t even reasonable to discriminate based on age due to “financial burden” concerns.
The only reasonable consideration I can think of for rejecting an immigration application is if someone is currently serving a sentence for a conviction, a defendant in a case, or otherwise reasonably expected to have committed a serious offense for which they could be convicted in the US. I suspect your list of celebrities is just a who’s who list of people who fall under this exception.
But even then, if they really wanted to be Americans… I’m sure we could offer them a spot in one of our for-profit prison systems.
invivoMark:
I suppose, but I reckon so many would-be residents don’t realise that slavery is perfectly legal in the USA, so long as it’s for punishment purposes, and though it’s not proper chattel slavery is yet merely enforced involuntary servitude to the state for as long as the state deems fit.
Right there in the 13th Amendment. Quite enlightened.
The small print, I suppose; after all, the bulk of the propaganda is about the land of the free, it’s not made obvious that slavery can easily occur if one is convicted and imprisoned.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_States
Norwegians with good education can easily find work in their own oil-money-fuelled economy, the Norwegians moving overseas may be young people striking out to see the world. Many would belong to the culture sector, trying to make it in USA.
So apart from scientists going to Princeton the best educated will stay in Oslo.
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During the Dubya years the overt hostility to immigrants from some regions made researchers discover the opportunities in the European Union. Yes, USA has indirectly encouraged the best researchers to go elsewhere, it can no longer take the influx of very highly educated people for granted!
@invivoMark, 15:
That was why I laid out arguments -- because I felt it more than likely that at least one of the commentariat here would just knee-jerk agree with WMDKitty’s assertion without thinking about it. Thank you for proving my suspicion correct.
It must be lovely living in a country that has no enemies. You don’t appear to have processed the concept here. You saw the second bit -- “immigrants from e.g. Iran” -- but didn’t read or didn’t bother to think about the possible implications of the phrase “sudden influx”. I would have thought those implications obvious, but since what I consider self-evident clearly isn’t to you, then here we go.
If there’s a humanitarian crisis in, e.g. Russia, and you get a spike in immigration applications by men, women and children of all ages and backgrounds -- well, OK then, that sudden influx makes sense. If you get a similar spike but there’s no obvious motivating event, and the applications are all coming specifically from men of fighting age, don’t you think you’d be foolish not to give that some additional attention -- perhaps even consider investigating further?
Ahahahaha. Very good. You do know, don’t you, that for over 20 years now the US government maintains a list of over eighty THOUSAND individuals who are not allowed to fly out of, into or even OVER the United States, much less be allowed to immigrate there? There’s a very low evidentiary standard for getting on that list, you’re not told you’re on it, and good luck getting off it. Over a thousand of the people on that list are US citizens. You seem to have a touching naivety about how very welcoming the US is.
On to the concept of age discrimination, and you don’t appear to be able to maintain the point even in your own attempt at rebuttal of mine.
First of all, I never suggested cutting people from social services. This isn’t about cutting people, it’s very specifically the absolute opposite, about ADDING people. And when you add old and infirm people, you’re adding a cost -- care for them isn’t free. Argue that it should be, by all means. Explain how that would be achieved. Meanwhile, in the real world, care costs. It is well established that there is a growing demographic problem facing western economies of more and more old people needing care and not enough young people maintaining the economy and paying for that care. It would seem reasonable to at the very least have a policy that doesn’t actively make that worse… but you don’t think that.
So the immigration system already requires older people have the resources available to not be a burden to the system -- great. Except you don’t agree with that -- you think more pressure on healthcare services and fewer services and places in care homes for people who’ve lived in and contributed taxes to [insert country] all their lives is a GOOD thing. OK.
That’s an odd list. Do many foreign prisoners attempt to immigrate to the US while serving their sentence? How does that work? Do you get many from people literally in the process of being prosecuted?
In any case, we appear to agree that there definitely is a list of things you could do that would reasonable bar you from being allowed to immigrate. As I said -- I think the productive question to ask is not “who should we let in?”, but rather, “who should we definitely NOT let in?” -- then be basically welcoming to everyone else.
And you simply couldn’t be bothered to take ten seconds to google even one of them.
You’d spend taxpayer’s money putting them through a trial? Seems a waste.
[I gotta love how how sonofrojblake is blissfully unaware of what I post]
https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploitation-of-incarcerated-workers
Simple cost-benefit ratio. Enslave them, profit! Worth a bit of taxpayer money, no?
@birgerjohannson 17,
I don’t think there’s any evidence of such a shift. Survey data shows that among science, engineering, and medicine postdocs, visa-holders peaked at around 57% in 2003, and have been steady since then, and are currently around 54%. (There was a decline due to COVID, but that appears to have been temporary.)
Table 1-3a: https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf22319#section10695
We shouldn’t take that section of the labor force for granted, and we should do everything we can to give these highly-skilled workers access to livable jobs, but they’ve managed to stick around through Bush and Trump.
@sonofrojblake, who lives in a weird fantasy world, apparently, where “self-evidently ridiculous” means “if you imagine these weird specific scenarios happening then bad things could happen.”
Is this currently happening in the US? Does it stand a reasonable chance of happening in the near future of the US? And what brainless Tom Clancy book did you get the idea from? Your argument is self-evidently ridiculous because it’s a fantasy.
Where the fuck did I suggest that the US has a welcoming or accessible immigration process? I’ve known a lot of immigrants. The process is damn near broken. Where are you getting the idea that I said anything to the contrary?
And they wouldn’t be added to social security or Medicare, like I already explained. For as much as you yammer on about others not bothering to read or to think, you seem to have failed to read or misread half my damn post. And that seems to be a pattern with you.
Sure. But that’s just my opinion. I have no idea whether WMDKitty would agree with me, but I still think her statement is logically and morally defensible regardless. We have extradition treaties for a reason.
Was I wrong?
sonofrojblake @12
To be fair at least some of that list would just have to pick the right state and persuade the parents, ok they’d have to do so serially but probably not too onerous.
…So far. And a key fact missing from this piece -- the quoted bits at least -- is that this is because economies around the world depend on constant positive growth indefinitely. At some point, this relationship has to be broken.
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#8 Matt
Probably because the expense of immigration is not as easily within the reach of the average uneducated African, or processing their applications takes longer due to less electronic records keeping in those nations, or character requirements are more stringent, or intake caps are lower, or any combination of the above and other things besides. I wouldn’t read too much into that study.
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#9 Marcus
I can’t respect anyone that believes such sovereign citizen nonsense.
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#11 WMDKitty
A rose-tinted fantasy. A nation that simply lets everyone in with no regard for what its economy can support will destabilise itself. Age, health, and disability for instance have ramifications for that nation’s social support systems, which can be overburdened by rapid changes in population and demographic proportions. Oh and criminal history, I suspect you’ll agree with me on that one if not the others.
“A nation that simply lets everyone in with no regard for what its economy can support will destabilise itself.”
This thread is filled with people making statements that they themselves find “obvious”, “self-evident”, etc, and as such think that there is no need to show proof of work.
Has any nation run this experiment? Is there any data behind this statement?
@invivoMark, 21:
Yeah, weird scenarios like espionage being a thing, old people’s enhanced medical needs being a thing, and undesirable criminals existing. Weird, off-the-wall scenarios like that.
I don’t know.
Current real-world observed patterns of illegal immigration into the south eastern UK. It’s not a fantasy, it’s the lived everyday experience of a lot of people. Do you know anyone from Kent? I do. It’s so widely recognised a phenomenon that Ricky Gervais wrote a joke about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVClLPauojQ
Now, you can debate, if you like, the significance of the overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants being young men, and whether they should be treated with a greater degree of suspicion than women or children -- we can have that conversation. But you can’t just deny it’s a thing. You’re entitled to your own opinion, you’re not entitled to your own facts.
That was a combination of sarcasm and hyperbole. Sorry if you didn’t get it -- it was in response to “How is national security relevant? The US has espionage laws. They don’t disallow immigrants or refugees. We currently do allow immigrants from Russia and Iran, and North Koreans are also allowed as refugees”.
So they’ll never cost the taxpayer a dime, regardless of what happens to them. These old, infirm people are never going to need an ambulance, never going to fall and break a bone requiring hospital care, never going to need any medications that they can’t buy for themselves. If they immigrate to the US and need anything they can’t pay for themselves, the US taxpayer will be happy to let them bleed to death on the street.
Actually, you know, that does actually sound like something Americans would be more than happy to see happen to immigrants. I take it back -- I don’t have ANY detailed knowledge of what “social security and Medicare” means in a practical sense, but I’m aware of the overall plot of “Breaking Bad” and I hadn’t factored in what a horrible place the US was to be anything less than a millionaire. You’re probably right, older immigrants would be no burden on the state and would be allowed to simply die in the street if they couldn’t afford care. You were right on that one and I was wrong, I guess. Well done. #shitholecountry.
Obviously…
Her statement -- which you concede would allow unrestricted immigration and would not discriminate against convicted paedophiles -- is “morally defensible”??? Wow.
This seems like a non-sequitur. Relevance?
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@Jazzlet, 22: oof, yeah. Again, #shitholecountry
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@Holms, 23:
True -- but there’s no evidence that point is anywhere near being reached in any developed economy. Sure, if enough young people emigrate from e.g. Albania, then sooner or later the whole place will just economically keel over. At that point, they’ll become recipients of aid from the richer countries, paid for in part by the taxes from the economic contribution those emigrants are making in a country better set up to turn their efforts and talents into cash.
I think the difficulty we’ve got currently is that the economic we’ve lived with since WW2 is predicated on the idea that you work for a living until 60 or 65ish, enjoy about 5 years of retirement, then succumb to the effects of the poison in the water, the lead in the petrol, the fumes in the air, the cigarettes you smoked and so on. And this worked great until relatively recently, But then boomers started retiring (early, a lot of them, and on final salary pensions) and the bastards had cleaned up the water, taken the lead out of the petrol, made laws about clean air and stopped smoking, and the inconsiderate fuckers just won’t die. They’re not wasting away at 68 in a nursing home, they’re Skyping their kids from bloody Thailand while said kids can’t buy a house because so many boomers took advantage of the property market and low interest rates to build up a buy-to-let portfolio. Developed nations are aging, and thanks to contraception and people actually having a choice, they’re making the choice not to saddle themselves with as many kids. The only solution is to welcome people in from other countries who don’t have the problems described… but unfortunately those boomers also vote and a lot of them “don’t like darkies”. I’m not a boomer, but my parents are, and we’ve discussed the way their generation pulled the ladder up behind them. My generation didn’t notice in time, but I’m actually optimistic the generations behind me will be more compassionate and realistic about immigration. The data seems to be backing me up, too -- people in the generation behind me are apparently not doing what has been traditional and getting more right wing as they get old. I hope they make a better job of things than my generation has, and I do believe they will.
That would require agreeing with me… so I suspect they won’t.
Your initial force diagram is incorrect.
You have allowed yourself to be distracted by predatory capitalists (and possibly the political right) into a false dichotomy Mano. Raise the top amount of income taxable for SSA, or eliminate this limit entirely. The stated problem about Social Security, to which the story of immigration was randomly attached? SSA becomes robustly funded and this problem goes away.
You and I are old and we know that you can chip away at things, and you can often use those reduction-based tools to make intractable problems whether they are physics or social, into tractable ones.
This one, perhaps not so simple as a uv substitution, no? Detach off this “problem” that’s not really related, that was jammed into the word-problem just to fuck with us by “teacher”.
I had a former coworker who immigrated here from Canada. She originally came from Guyana and was a devout Muslim. She wanted to become an American citizen and this was right after 9/11 . The crap she had to put up with from Immigration turned me off La Migra . 2 Hispanic Woman who came here as a baby . Her parents both died when she was a small child and she grew up here not knowing that she wasn’t a citizen. She had a fake SSN that she’d been using as a teen. La Migra fought hard to get her deported even though she knew no one in her home country and didn’t even speak the language. To make matters worse she was married to a citizen and had 2 children. 3 Man came here illegally, built up a successful restaurant business and was also married to a citizen. . La Migra’ s interference almost ruined the business because he was jailed. This abuse La Migra puts decent people through is disgusting.
Why couldn’t they have just sorta grandfathered these people in?
brightmoon, ah, right. Not being Latino, but merely having been born and had my childhood in Spain, that seemed iffy terminology. I had to look it up, since I thought it had put you off migrating in general, instead of a USA compliance body.
So, American Spanish. It’s not a noun in Spanish Spanish, there it’s either the imperative or the present indicative of the verb ‘migrar’.
Gotcha.
[oh, right. By ‘gotcha’ I mean I now get you, not that I’ve tricked you. In case I seem mean.
I know, it’s probably something I should have previously known in any case, or just worked out for myself]
@30 it like when my Hispanic neighbors say omigah not quite realizing that they’re saying oh my God . Migra is garbled Spanglish for immigration
Heh, brightmoon. When I was a kid newly arrived here in Oz, I used to think “I don’t know” sounded like “I no no”, so that’s what I said. I’m sure I sounded simple-minded thereby.
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On-topic, of course it’s the go-getters, the motivated people, the doers and the makers, the brave and the aspiring ones who make the effort to migrate for the sake of their future and their children’s, despite all the drama and hardship that entails.
Here in Australia, we’ve been cruel and xenophobic about it since the late 1990s, usually because of the conservative side of politics, but still, we’ve had a shitload of immigrants and we rely on them for demographic purposes. No less a melting-pot, but without land borders, which probably makes a difference.
Ah! The mass immigration issue. Specifically mass immigration into developed countries (Canada, USA, EU, Japan?, South Korea?).
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Advocates for mass immigration display a mixture of naïveté, arrogance, selfishness, ignorance, and moral inconsistency. Empathy without understanding (aka naïveté) leads to foolishness. Mano is long on empathy, short on understanding.
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XENOPHOBIA! XENOPHOBIA!! XENOPHOBIA!!! The cries of mass immigration advocates at mass immigration skeptics.
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Healthy societies have solid standards for citizenship; Mr Singham conflates said standards with xenophobia. How dare you NOT embrace refugees without question!!!
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Xenophilia (love of the stranger) is a much more accurate indication of social dysfunction, of societal disunity than xenophobia.
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Xenophobia, distrust of the foreigner, is the natural state of all life forms. If a wolf of pack A enters the territory of pack B, pack B wolves will challenge the pack A wolf. Fight may ensue. If a foreign body (inert or living) enters your body, your immune system will do its most to reject the foreign body. When a stranger approaches a mother with child, the child usually clutches tighter to the mother. If the child distances from the mother and welcomes the stranger, something is not right: is the home situation so terrible that the attention of strangers is welcome? Is the USA becoming a nation of Blanche Dubois (“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”)?
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As a proper citizen, you should focus more on common interest(s) with your fellow citizens than with members of another nation. A parent caring more about someone else’s child than its own is not only a bad parent but also a bad person. Get your own house in order before you go invite strangers inside. Advice from the wise: the host makes the house rules, not the guest.
The good guest, the welcomed guest is one who follows the host rules.
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The foreigner is not an altruist. The foreigner is not supposed to be an altruist. Anyone depending on the altruism of the foreigner is setting itself as a fool. A clear-headed citizen understands where its interests lie; if the foreigner’s interests are compatible with yours, the welcome mat is put out, if not then the foreigner is kept at a safe distance from the citizenry.
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Stating that “The Camp of the Saints” is popular with White Supremacists is irrelevant. Adolf Hilter was a non-smoker and a vegetarian. So today (2024 A.D.) being a vegetarian makes you a NAZI?
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Seen versus Unseen. Mano shows a picture of a man and son crossing a river by foot. A sad picture. A sorrowful picture. You HAVE to admit the father-son combo into the USA!!! For every father-son combo, there are at least 10 families so destitute that they cannot reach the Rio Grande. Should the USA and Canada send a flotilla of ships, a fleet of Jumbo jets to collect all the poor and miserable of the World? The father-son = the Seen. The 10 destitute families = the Unseen. Such naïveté of mass immigration advocates.
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An attractive woman and 100 men. All 100 men desire the woman. But the woman can marry only 1 man. To avoid the anger of 99 men should the woman become a whore? Similarly should the USA, Canada, the EU become the whores of the World, obligated to take in all comers?
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Morality has at least 2 levels: personal and societal. One morning, the owner of a diner sees a beggar at the door; the owner gives the beggar free breakfast. Next morning, the owner sees 100 beggars at the door. The owner closes the diner. Personal solutions scale badly to societal level. Does this mean that the diner owner suddenly has a hatred for 100 beggars?
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The advocacy of mass immigration to the USA is similar to the advocacy of slavery of yesteryear: “Import the Africans! We need the labor!!! We want only the healthy STRONG Africans!!!” This advocacy for mass immigration betrays a base and vile “racist” attitude that some nations (usually failed, s***h**e states) are to be “breeder” nations. At some point (and not too distant future) the global population will decline, with all national populations declining. The advocacy of mass immigration for any nation betrays ideological myopia. The advocacy of mass immigration is so much sweeping under the rug the need for societal repair, for cultural repair, for demographic repair, for political repair, for economic repair.
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In July 3, 1984, the Wall Street Journal advocated a five-word constitutional amendment: “There shall be open borders.” Big Business loves slave, err… correction, CHEAP labor. Screw the American citizen.
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In 1900 and 2020 the global population was 1.60B and 7.84B respectively; a 5-fold increase. The global median age (yrs) in 1950, 1970, 2023 is respectively 22.2, 20.3, 30.5. Experts predict that in 2100 the global median age will be 42.3. As of 2020 AD the median age in Japan is 48.0 yrs. Japan now is what the world could or would be in 100 years. Japan has a very restrictive immigration policy (foreigners of japanese ancestry are given preference), its economics is pretty solid, its national debt is not beholden to foreign creditors, its societal harmony is pretty solid. Yes, Japan has its problems and it aims to self-solve the problems; no need for mass immigration. Japan follows the “FUBU” principle: For Us By Us. Japan is driven by pragmatism, not ideology. Learn from Japan.
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Is mass immigration to the USA actually needed for labor needs? Answer: No. The economist Thomas Sowell stated for many years that labor shortages in the USA are phony, that employers need to pay market rates and the labor shortages will disappear. The H-1B, H-2B programs: are South Asian IT professionals actually needed in the USA? Answer: No. The impetus for the H visas is that, back in the day (1980’s), it was very hard to fire american citizens. Now, in the 2020’s, many employment protections for US citizens are gone so the main reason for the H visas is that foreigners are paid less and not so much they are still easier to fire than US citizens. The Big Tech firms have branches in Asia and Europe so why not keep asian workers in Asia? Why the compulsion to bring asian workers to the USA? Why the compulsion to tear asian workers away from their beloved homelands?
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The advocacy of mass immigration betrays a government with broken discipline. A State government cannot balance the budget and thus relies on Federal funds since States cannot print money. A Federal/National government cannot balance its budget and thus prints money, thus increasing inflation, devaluing the currency, increasing the national debt. A Nation cannot get its economics, its demographics, its politics in order and thus promotes mass immigration.
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It is ironic that a State/Nation promoting mass immigration for manpower needs also promotes the ultimate killer of manpower: abortion.