This is inaccurate. More people, even low skilled ones are still a huge benefit to your society. They buy goods and services in the local economy increasing demand and work tax paying jobs. Immigrants children grow up to greatly out earn their parents pay way more in taxes than they their parents. The only immigrant group that could be considered a liability are older low skilled workers who have passed the age to have kids and live a couple of decades of working years. The reason certain countries don’t like immigration is because a conservative faction wants to keep society in place.
Maybe we have to rethink our economic system so that producing more humans just to create new customers is a perverse incentive.
Less humans means less demand means less work. In our current paradigm, this is a problem. In a healthy paradigm, it is a solution.
Less people? Rebalance human development with nature.
Less consumption of resources? Wonderful.
Less jobs? Great, let's all work less and live more.
Many would call this utopia, I call it sanity. I'd also say that couple not reproducing or doing so at increasingly old age, is the ultimate sign of how our economic system doesn't even support one of the most natural things there are: to form a family. It is openly hostile to this option.
And we want do double down on that? The trend of economic security is going to be even less, not more.
> The reason certain countries don’t like immigration is because a conservative faction wants to keep society in place.
This is so simplified that it is basically false. There are a range of reasons for not supporting immigration, but basically no one wants to "keep society in place". I will note that the USA had historically low immigration in the post-war period that was associated with rapidly rising wellbeing[0].
That was almost entirely due to America rebuilding Europe and every other major industrial power knocked off their perch for a couple of decades. It had nothing to do with immigration. Additionally Americans were still having lots of kids at that point so the population was growing without immigratiom.
Those European countries also developed fast without much immigration (including Switzerland and the Nordics, which were not affected much by the war). It may have nothing to do with immigration, but you certainly haven't proved that.
Edit: Currently the poorest parts of the US population are stagnating at best, at a time when rates of both legal and illegal immigration are quite high. It is hard to make the argument that immigration is preventing things from getting worse.
Yea they were mostly rebuilding the physical world and not having to completely rebuild society from the ground. Small countries like the Nordics aren’t great examples because they’re so small and a massive part of their wealth came from selling oil to the wider world. The amount of oil revenue generated per person in those countries allowed them develop such a high standard of living along with really smart and egalitarian government policy and investment. That’s not really repeatable for a country as large as the US although money could certainly be used better.
France invited large amounts of immigrants from Africa to help rebuild so it’s not like they didn’t see immigration.
I think there are two main reasons that the poorest parts of the population are stagnating. One is poverty traps, and especially multi generational poverty traps are very hard to escape. Another is geographic location. Americans dont move as much as they used to, all around the world poorer people move to areas with more jobs and opportunity but today mostly richer people move and poorer people stay put in areas that are impoverished.
Immigrants largely don’t come with a set geography or generational poverty weighing them down which is why their kids do so well.
That's inaccurate at best about the Nordics. Norway, yes, and Denmark to some degree. Neither Finland or Sweden have or had any significant oil and gas reserves, but built their economies on industry (and mining to some extent).
Agreed, but mining has historically been a big in Sweden (part of the reason why so many minerals were named by Swedish scientists). While we now have focus on other areas it has always been an important part of the economy.
This is pretty wrong. Most immigrants come from much poorer countries, and they themselves have to restart everything from scratch, with little saving and no home ownership.
People coming from the Philipines, or India, or Eastern Europe, post communism from the 90s had to restart everything from scratch, including learning the language, yet over time they end up doing well.
You have this weird mentality, that all immigrants are coming rich, and from rich countries, which is the opposite from the truth.
I guarantee, that Someone in Bangladesh coming here, has had a much harder life, than the average minority living in Brooklyn or Queens.
Yet, even the obstacles, they end up doing better than the locals. So, initial conditions are not the major hamperer of success.
Not sure where you got that idea but I definitely don't think all immigrants coming here are rich, I'm a huge advocate for more poorer/low skilled immigration. I've outlined in a bunch of other comments why exactly but for them if their life struggling in the US is better than where they left and they are voluntarily here to give themselves and their children a better life it's good with me and a huge benefit to the USA.
> Currently the poorest parts of the US population are stagnating at best, at a time when rates of both legal and illegal immigration are quite high. It is hard to make the argument that immigration is preventing things from getting worse.
An argument that immigration is a net positive for the economy:
> Some anecdotes of small towns being saved by immigration
Why would saving small towns in general be a value?
The US has desperately needed vast consolidation of small population centers and increased population density toward greater urbanization, for many decades.
One of the worst attributes of the US is its over-sprawl and weak development of public transportation. The ideal would be to eliminate thousands upon thousands of small towns, with those populations moving to far superior situations in or near cities, and for the US to stop being lazy and stupid about building out public transportation.
Saving small towns is certainly not a good argument for huge volumes of low-skill immigration at exactly the wrong time in history for that type of immigration. The US should be copying Canada and Australia, focusing primarily on high-skill immigration and dramatically reducing low-skill immigration. What the highly developed welfare states all grasp that the US still doesn't (apparently), is that the immense value in high-skill immigration, beyond the obvious, is that it brings a huge immediate net tax positive that pays for your existing population's social welfare costs, whereas low-skill labor does something closer to the exact opposite. Most low-skill labor would struggle to covers its own real social security cost over time, much less everything else. The US has a very progressive taxation system, high-skill labor foots the tax bills. High-skill labor is also vastly superior as it pertains to net healthcare costs and system subsidization. Every functional welfare state in Europe knows all of this, meanwhile the US is wandering around like an idiot in the dark bumping into walls.
Far less low-skill labor, more automation, far more high-skill labor, increased social safety net from the net tax boost of inverting the labor focus, build public transportation, greater consolidation of population centers, all linked by regional high-speed rail. We already know this model works exceptionally well and we know exactly why it works.
Postwar sprawl is a huge problem, but it'd be good if prewar towns were saved.
You're going to get pushback if you try to say "everyone needs to live in the Big City". They don't. There are other options.
Because streetcar suburbs are fine. Villages are fine. Actual towns are fine.
What's bad is strip-mall sprawl. Highways, burbclaves, and office parks. None of that is worth saving.
And some of the new "denser" development misses the point. Rows of townhomes set up in a farm off the highway with no commercial center? That's dense but bad.
New condo complexes -- private compounds with pools and such -- that take up whole city blocks? Also dense, but bad. These represent the "enclosure" (with everything that entails) of urban space.
But "small towns"? Fine -- if they're actually towns, and not just strip-mall wastelands.
You're wrong that low-skilled immigration is a net loss for the USA. Low skilled immigrants contribute more than they take out by a good amount. They increase demand and grow the economy. Additionally their kids grow up and out earn them drastically being huge net-positives.
Small towns not connected to big cities are shrinking unceasingly, unless there is some special local thing to save them, like a special factory or a tourist attraction. In my part of the south almost every town had their downtown destroyed first by walmart, and then later by the ecosystem of small businesses all withered away and now the downtowns of places with a few thousand people have almost nothing but a grocery store and gas station. On top of the young people move out of all of these towns looking for work. It's got to be incredibly sad for older people to see their world just disappearing, which is think is part of the appeal of certain nationalist politicians.
Your point about high-skill vs. low-skill immigration is interesting, but allow me to invert it: If developed countries can benefit by causing (only) high-skilled people to immigrate, can they also benefit by somehow causing (only) low-skilled people to emigrate?
Their point is that is becoming less and less true and will likely be false soon. Most labor simply isn't worth as much as it used to be. This is evident in stagnant wages and the view of large families not as assets but as liabilities.
You can try to spur local demand by expanding your population (via birth or immigration) but what we really care about is GDP per capita. Most very populous countries are not wealthy.
Taking stagnant wages to imply that the labor is worth less is taking for granted that reduced prices means reduced value. It's probably more accurate (though still oversimplifying) to view it as a cartel suppressing wages.
the wonder of economic development is that as a country's quality of life and wealth increases, consumption increases.
the typical american probably consumes about 4000x as much energy as the typical DRC. we still have a long, long way to go before we can accommodate the whole world living like an american.
even as population growth stalls, or even reverses course, the ability of humans to keep expanding its appetite for the finer things in life can never be quelled.
The average energy usage per person in the USA has been going down in the past few decades as appliances and electronics get more efficient. It will continue to go down as more things electrify and shift to renewables. We can decrease resource consumption through smarter growth policies like building denser, public transit while growing our population for economic benefit.
> They buy goods and services in the local economy increasing demand and work tax paying jobs.
That heavily depends on the immigrant group, and is, on average, not true in most of Europe where many immigrants heavily depend on welfare and it turns into intergenerational dependency. I'm sure it's different in countries that aren't offering full benefits to immigrants, and are much harder to reach via illegal migration, i.e. the US, Canada, Australia or New Zealand, but that kind of blanket statement isn't accurate.
I’ve read about this and a big reason is it’s simply so much easier to get a job in the US. You’re not dealing with unions and America just has way more low paying jobs. You can def argue this isn’t a good thing but working a low paying job is better than working no job.
Limited supply of housing is an artificial local government constraint using tools like zoning and permitting to stop the construction of new housing keep prices high for incumbent owners. I agree it’s a huge problem but I would rather fight the constraint on supply than limit demand (partially immigrants) when they contribute so much else. We shouldn’t restrict economic growth and deny millions of people the chance at a better life to appease NIMBYs.
USA is amazing at assimilating immigrants. Mostly the places the furthest away from any immigrants that don’t actually interact with them have a problem. The melting pot isn’t a myth it’s real.
Please. We have 40% unemployment in Greece among young people. Housing is bloody expensive to build. It is not some goverment conspiracy!
Did you actually try to immigrate into US? It is one of the worst countries at accepting immigration. Any normal country gives citizenship after 5 years of residency. In US it is like 30 years.
And from far away it looks like your melting pot is broken. Too many groups fighting each other.
"30 years" is factually incorrect. The requirement is to be a permanent resident for 5 years (I can find links if needed). Source: I'm currently awaiting my naturalization appointment, if all goes well the total time from setting my foot in the US to becoming a citizen will be few months short of 9 years (~2.5 years on work visa & 5 years on green card + ~1.5 years wait for naturalization appointment).
With that said, it may be tricky to become a resident [1] in the first place. There are per-country-of-birth quotas, currently the wait times for people born in China / India can be significant (if taking the work visa route), up to 11 years. The longest wait that I see is for family-based immigration from Mexico - 24 years' wait for "married sons/daughters of US citizens". [2]
[1] resident to me means lawful permanent resident
Only one category ("married children of US citizens"), only for Mexicans, comes close enough to ~30 years total time (~24 years waiting to become LPR, +5 years being an LPR in USA) to consider the "30 years" as valid IMO. The fact still remains that the requirement for citizenship is to be a LPR for 5 years (this is the upper bound, there are cases where less is possible), it is the LPR part that may take time, as I've already mentioned in a reply to my comment. For China and India the total times are closer to 15-20 years. All of this is for family-based immigration, which I'd expect to be generally less interesting as it requires people to already have a fairly close family member who is a US citizen.
Not familiar with housing in Greece. I should have clarified I’m talking about the US where housing is quite cheap to build but regulations make it illegal to build most types of housing.
I was born in the US but a lot of my family are immigrants and I know how tough the system is, I’m arguing to make it much easier.
I’m sure on the outside it does look broken and there are lots of issues to fix, but take a walk around pretty much any American urban metro area and it’s working amazingly well.
I can understand the situation in Greece is much different, especially when compare the amount of refugees compared to the population of Greece. But I think a lot of the issues boil down to Greece having a quite shit economy at the moment causing more issues. If jobs were abundant in Greece then I think immigration wouldn’t be as contentious. Although that’s just me taking from no experience. I’m interested in hearing your view.
I would love to see how American cities deal with large scale immigration. SF got maybe 10k people on its streets and there is already talk about martial law and forcefully mopping people into rehabs. What would SF do with 1 million people on its streets? Athens and other cities managed...
Greece does not have a shit economy, we do relatively well. There are simply not enough jobs.
US is the same. Show me an entry level job, that pays enough to buy a house and raise a family...
Do you mean like NYC? Literally the city built on large scale immigration? Also the state of California. Houston, Texas is the most diverse city in the country and you can buy a house for less than the national average. There are hundreds of millions of people in the US who own homes and raise families on entry level jobs, the just don't live in high cost of living areas. That's not to say their lives are all perfect and rosy but its possible. I'm not denying housing affordability is a problem, it absolutely is but narrowing your view of America to SF when it is the most extreme example is a little disingenuous. My hometown has tons of people where 2 parents work slightly above minimum wage jobs and own homes and raise families. It's 2 hours from 2 major cities. You can absolutely have a good life without making a ton of money. Now healthcare... that's a separate issue.
If there are simply not enough jobs in Greece, that means the economic situation isn't great. A highly functioning economy should be produces lots of jobs as businesses grow and expand. I'm not arguing Greece should take more immigrants though, you sound like you don't want them and neither does your country. I would be happy for America to accept all of them, refugee or PhD Scientist, but unfortunately the political situation at the moment doesn't allow for that.
》but take a walk around pretty much any American urban metro area and it’s working amazingly well.
I choosed SF bcos you wrote this. NY etc have similar problem. Modern US cities are not capable to accept and absorb large scale immigration of people who are not already integrated into society. People who do not speak local language and have very different culture.
Martial law was suggested as a way to force homeless into shelters and rehabs. SF gets around 700 people per year, and it already abandoned basic humanitarian principles. Look at recent Louis Rossmann video, this mishandling is systemic problem in US: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8WGjCeFyr1g&pp=sAQA
Why didn't you try to look at some numbers? If anything, immigration to the US has accelerated in the last 50 years. 4.7 percent of the population were immigrants in 1970. The number increased to 13.7 percent in 2019.
"Since 1970, the share and number of immigrants have increased rapidly, mainly because of large-scale immigration from Latin America and Asia. The vast diversification of immigration flows was ushered in by important shifts in U.S. immigration law (including the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 which abolished national-origin admission quotas; the creation of a formal refugee resettlement program with the Refugee Act of 1980; and the Cold War-era grant of preferential treatment to Cuban immigrants); the United States’ growing economic and military presence in Asia and Latin America; economic ties, social linkages, and deep migration history between the United States and its southern neighbors; and major economic transformations and political instability in countries around the world." - [0]
People from Asia and Latin America, those who contribute the majority of the boom in migration since 1970s, are those by default don't speak English natively and have distinct culture. 22 percent American spoke a language other than English at home.
> Modern US cities are not capable to accept and absorb large scale immigration of people who are not already integrated into society. People who do not speak local language and have very different culture.
Incorrect. As of 2018, 20% of NYC residents are naturalized citizens (born abroad), 10.9% are legal and 6.3% are undocumented immigrants. [1]
You can disagree but it's true, the melting pot isn't a myth. I'm a brown skinned child of immigrants and my entire friend group is white and black people who have been here for generations along with other children of immigrants. Even my anti-immigrant Trump supporting next door neighbors are like a second family to me. Again for the vast majority of the country people get along amazingly well regardless of background, you just hear about the bad parts on the news. You can keep thinking people don't integrate into society but after 1 generation of being in the US anyone from anywhere can safely call themselves American. I can't say the same for Greece but culturally in the US wave after wave of immigrants become fully integrated American quite fast.
