Its oddly refreshing to see the word "immigrant" used here properly.
Political debates in the US keep tossing around their term "migrants" as though immigrants are legal and migrants are not. That has nothing to do with it, you can immigrate illegally and you can migrate legally (we have plenty of migrant workers in the US legally every year).
Chalk one up for lazy politics and an inept public education system I guess. If immigration is going to be such an important issue people should be taught how it even works in the first place.
As far as Germany goes, what's the distinction? If you immigrate without legal status, didn't you immigrate illegally? Or do those who get status after enter as a visitor staying legally for less than 6 months?
I immigrated from the US to the Netherlands and entered as a visitor, mainly because we had to do all the paperwork in person once we got there. Got lucky too, the immigration service was shut down as part of the pandemic response a week after our papers went through.
The data in this article is bullshit. For example, in Germany, there are no 15.8 Million immigrants. There are 15.8 M people with an immigration background, which have at least one parent who is an immigrant. Most of them are born in Germany. The actual number of immigrants is much smaller.
I don't know where they have a number of 680k illegal immigrants, but it is way too low. That's the number of people that needs to be expedited, but for a reason they are still there. The total number may be much higher once the slow German bureaucracy starts actually tackling the unknown bucket and sorting it in legal and illegal buckets.
Assuming you're in the US, what is your opinion of the Statue of Liberty? Should we test it down as we no longer want the hungry, sick, and poor?
Immigration causes financial issues for welfare programs for sure. But you're abandoning how the US became what we are today if you want to gate entry based on merit or similar metrics.
> I'm not american but I'm not sure you want to live in what was the US at that time in terms of crime statistics.
There's a lot at play when comparing now and then, I don't think its as easy as pegging it fundamentally on immigration laws. Our government was much smaller then. Our legal system was much smaller then. Policing looked much different. We didn't have welfare programs helping those in need. The list goes on and on, pinning crime statistics on immigration impossible.
> People in a country should be able to chose whether they want or not other people and how much. It's a basic idea.
Maybe, that would depend largely on how much you think the individual matters compared to the collective. Going back to an earlier era with effectively open immigration, our country was driven much more by the rights of the individual than it is today. If that's what most people want there's nothing wrong with that, but the question isn't as simple as people getting to decide who they want to let in.
> There's a lot at play when comparing now and then, I don't think its as easy as pegging it fundamentally on immigration laws. Our government was much smaller then. Our legal system was much smaller then. Policing looked much different. We didn't have welfare programs helping those in need. The list goes on and on, pinning crime statistics on immigration impossible.
From an external point of view it feels almost ANY US welfare program (starting with education or healthcare for everybody) is terrible compared to the counterpart of Europe ones for example so that's not a good argument for uncontrolled immigration in the US.
Then, you'll also see that people is Europe are slowly realizing exactly what I said about some cultures that cannot mix, so maybe the quality of welfare programs have nothing to do with it ?
> Maybe, that would depend largely on how much you think the individual matters compared to the collective. Going back to an earlier era with effectively open immigration, our country was driven much more by the rights of the individual than it is today. If that's what most people want there's nothing wrong with that, but the question isn't as simple as people getting to decide who they want to let in.
Yeah well indeed when there's not much of a society and you're a new world there's no point to gatekeep, indeed. Once you've reached peak country in economy & some values it thus may be worth trying to preserve the culture that brought you there instead of saying it's "oppression" and it must be "deconstructed" by immigration for example.
> From an external point of view it feels almost ANY US welfare program (starting with education or healthcare for everybody) is terrible compared to the counterpart of Europe ones for example so that's not a good argument for uncontrolled immigration in the US.
If you're comparing welfare programs based on cost of the program to the financial benefits to the average person, I'd totally agree. It seems like European programs are generally much better at this than the US.
> Then, you'll also see that people is Europe are slowly realizing exactly what I said about some cultures that cannot mix, so maybe the quality of welfare programs have nothing to do with it ?
Well this gets to the underlying point, immigration and welfare programs are fundamentally at odds. It sounds like you'd prioritize welfare and accept tradeoffs that limit immigration. I just have the opposite priority, I don't believe its my right to tell someone else they can't live here and accept that means welfare programs can't work.
Sure, though we shouldn't hold up the poetry or the statue as a symbol of our country then.
There is a lot of what went into America that would be (or has been) lost by completely abandoning the idea though. Maybe its worth it, that's not for any one person to decide, but its a huge change and there's always the risk of throwing out the baby with the bath water.
It is still a symbol of the country. Settling the US was a meat grinder, and you basically turned up and sank or swam. You weren't ever a cost back then; you were an asset.
Now with all the various welfare programmes you can easily become a cost, although of course that's only a proportion of the people coming in, just as it's only a proportion of the people born in the country. But it's silly to equate what happened back then with what's happening now. And it's unfair to hold the US to this standard and not any other country. Particularly when the US takes in more (legal) immigrants than any other country each year.
Totally agree on the challenge with welfare programs. To me that's more a sign that welfare programs were never going to be sustainable though. We still haven't found a way to secure our borders, without that welfare is a blank check.
I don't hold other countries to a standard only because I have no say in how the are run. I would actually prefer to see countries freely allowing immigration and emigration, but I'm not going to say anyone else has to or even should.
What's often lost, in my opinion, with regards to the statue is that the whole point was that anyone should be able to move here if they want to give it a shot and none should be able to take away that right from anyone else.
That might be the point of the statue; I don't know. But equally the point of the pyramids might've been to ensure the world venerated the Pharoahs for eternity, and that's not happening today. I don't see why a landmark would have legal force.
To be fair the society that idolized those pharaohs is long gone though. It'd be a different story with the statue of liberty if the US was gone.
Landmarks don't have to have legal force. My only point here, that I'm almost certainly over complicating or muddying, is that the statue is still held as a symbol of our country but we seem to fundamentally disagree with what the statue stood for in the first place.
It seems disingenuous but that alone isn't a huge deal. My concern personally is that I do still believe in what the statue stood for, and I think most people arguing immigration miss the fundamental question of should one person be allowed to stop another from choosing to live here and make a life for themselves. The argument usually jumps straight to how to limit it, not whether one should have the right to limit it.
No one disagrees with what it stood for; in fact, the US is still the world leader in immigration. But that doesn't mean illegal immigration is okay. If we want to play statue originalists for a second, the fact that the statue stands as an invitation shows it believes that an invitation is required to enter someone else's country.
Interesting, I don't actually read the poem on the statue as an invitation so much as an ideal that an invitation isn't needed since everyone is welcomed.
Illegal immigration is a whole bag of worms since it only comes down to what laws we choose to write. Our immigration policies today are much more strict than they were historically (with a possible caveat for wartime years). Where it once was legal as long as you went through a port of entry and provided basic info, today its a multi year process tied to merit and limited by caps on total immigration and country of origin. Both were legal if you followed the rules of the day, but the rules are drastically more strict today.
We've got both a declining birth rate and an economy that demands growth. Our biggest competitor is 4x our size. We have vast open spaces, and a history of repeatedly, successfully incorporating waves of immigrants. We're not even remotely full.
Its still a more fundamental question for me than whether were full.
Should we be able to decide who has a chance to live here at all? We have laws and you have to abide by them, but beyond that I'm not sure why I should get to be gate keeper at all. We'd have to get rid of welfare programs if we have no cap on immigrations, but honestly if someone wants to move here and try to make a better life for themselves I don't see what the problem is.
I'm sure most would say crime, but that's just not a compelling argument. We will never have a bulletproof immigration system, people will find ways to sneak through went we don't want to let them in. More importantly, crime isn't a foreign problem - we have domestic crime that has nothing to do with immigrants.
"I'm sure most would say crime, but that's just not a compelling argument. We will never have a bulletproof immigration system, people will find ways to sneak through went we don't want to let them in. More importantly, crime isn't a foreign problem - we have domestic crime that has nothing to do with immigrants."
So let me rephrase: "we have already some internal crime so there's no point trying to limit another source of crime" ?
As far as I'm concerned, it isn't my right to tell someone else that they can't live here. If someone wants to come to the US to try to make a better life for themselves, I wish them the best of luck and hope they succeed. I don't think its anyone's right to claim the right to decide who is worthy of getting a chance here.
When it comes to crime, its not that we already have crime so don't bother. We have to deal with crime either way, and the potential benefit of closing borders isn't worth stepping on what I consider a fundamental right. We also haven't answered how to know who will commit a crime if they come here, unless we have precogs hidden away in a pool somewhere.
Political debates in the US keep tossing around their term "migrants" as though immigrants are legal and migrants are not. That has nothing to do with it, you can immigrate illegally and you can migrate legally (we have plenty of migrant workers in the US legally every year).
Chalk one up for lazy politics and an inept public education system I guess. If immigration is going to be such an important issue people should be taught how it even works in the first place.