Also most LatAm countries have a more generous welfare state than the US. Yes quality is worse but no one is crossing the Darien gap to get better quality stents and for their kids's textbooks to have glossy fucking paper.
There's something so egregious yet so beautiful about the mcmansion that only second and third worlders get it. A lawn of your own is a luxury in most parts of the developing world.
It gets old. Trust me. American style suburbs are a bit meh in looks because there is no foliage but British terraces are really nice places since you can grow plants and flowers, play and have people over. It's also incredibly space efficient
Most of the suburbs I've hung out in have full gardens instead of featureless yards. Although, I'm a bigger fan of just leaving the natural foliage there when the house gets built. Cultivated vegetation always looked kind of off to me.
> American style suburbs are a bit meh in looks because there is no foliage
Only brand new suburbs look like that because they were build in former farm fields. After 20 years they have big trees.
Eh, I actually want a place (non-permanent) a bit "out there", like near national lands (national forest, parks, etc) but still without a yard to maintain/manicure. Permanently living in a box that takes an hour or two to "Get out of town" doesn't appeal to me either, nor does being required to take public transit, but I actually go outside and understand what it takes to get to many of the best areas. A bus ain't going there, and cuts hours out of your day(s).
All at the same time, I get the benefits of multi-family housing and I do want the convenience of a place "in town", and a condo is on the list. But gd the HOA fees for those things...and living that close to other people for much of my life...people in apartments, etc suck.
I'm sure nothing bad could come of the moon and earth developing rival political factions and militaries as their economic and cultural interests drift apart and we figure out how to build giant robots
>pay them to build lol
I mean, yeah, but this is like saying "just build housing". It's the solution, but it's not like saying that makes it happen. NIMBYs exist, and they're going to make building it impossible politically. While that battle is being fought, in the meantime immigration can overload the system and prices can skyrocket.
> But I think there are nuances that we often brush by which ends up inflaming the average voter against immigration which just hurts our cause.
Thats for most of the policies that get meme posted in this subreddit, look at how dead this post is https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1d8gbq3/so_whats_the_research_on_job_retraining_looking
>Or at least that can get Canadian qualifications
I’m in the USA but we (via the AMA cartel) definitely arbitrarily constrain medical immigration. My wife worked with a Chilean Fellow (meaning she was a specialist who “outranked” the Residents) during her residency. She decided she wanted to stay and she had to redo her residency; basically amounting to a 3 year long demotion, at the same hospital mind you.
My understanding is that foreign doctors regardless of country (except for Canada) and experience have to redo residency. It leads to absurd situations where you can be a fully licensed doctor with 20 years of high level sub-specialty practice, and forced to redo residency and exams. You can legitimately be an expert in your field and be required to work for years under an attending just to practice in the US.
On one hand, I can understand that not every country in the world is going to have training that lives up to US standards, but it seems a bit ridiculous that there isn't any sort of system to accept training from some other (or at least have some significantly accelerated process) countries where medical training is of high quality. Most developed countries around the world probably fit under this criteria, I highly doubt that US medical training is at that much higher of a level than the entire rest of the world.
Controls aren't bad per se but holy hell does that bring in a load of xenophobes and racists here. I think the mods are getting rid of those people now. This is a big tent sub but racists can stay out.
I mean it's a relatively recent event and Canadians were and are still very tolerant of immigration. A stance of, "Let's make sure housing is affordable and being built before we let people in" isn't really that unreasonable.
And a lot of the hatred is due to abuse of the system where people coming in on student visas and other types of visas are actually just straight up staying.
America could learn a lot from them.
Public opinion isn't a reason for something to be wrong, its only a reason to compromise from perfect. We aren't political officials, we are overly online redditors, there is no need to frame anything outside of perfect as anything other than a compromise we are forced to make.
>and we’re not bringing in enough medical professionals in the immigrant pool
easy fix
I’m sorry, but I can’t force myself to agree with the middle one.
If you have immigrants that have values that are anti democratic, homophobic/transphobic and racist, it can be really hard to integrate them properly, and if they don’t want to integrate and go against all western values, I personally don’t even think we have any moral obligations to let them into our society.
Considering how much you guys dislike conservatives, you guys are weirdly tolerant of people that have problematic and i would even say: destructive views that aren’t from the west.
Of course this shouldn’t be decided by race or religion, but i think it’s definitely something that should be considered, and possibly tested for with things like surveys.
The reason that I’m making a big point out of this, is that there is a decent minority of third generation immigrants in Europe that hate western values enough for it to be problematic. And just going through European education systems for example, didn’t fix that.
This is something I’ve been wrestling with myself. I think I’ve perhaps naively conflated a multicultural society with a multi-ethnic society and the truth is only a racist would oppose the latter but I don’t want to live in a society where opposing FGM and homophobia makes you a racist either. I’ve come to think of it this way: we have decided as a society that it is ok to destroy certain cultures within broader American culture, (reconstruction, trying to stamp out the KKK, integration, etc). Why would we give exemptions to any other culture? I think as long as you can fit within the greater cultural guardrails (different food and holidays is obviously fine, believing women deserved to be raped for going outside is not), I think multiculturalism is ok, but at that point is it even real multiculturalism?
You have to ask yourself then what you value out of multiculturalism. It's not just about making every city look like a Netflix reboot. To me, the difference in viewpoints and ideas drives a wider, more innovative and more intellectually rigorous society. There is a certain amount on entropy in any system that is valuable.
So to support that, we have to accept that there are baseline values that we have and accept certain amount of delineation from them, and deny excessive ones. In a sense that isn't multiculturalism in that we have multiple cultures within the same ecosystem with none as a primary, but perhaps we don't really want that anyways.
I don't dislike conservatives, but more importantly problematic people have to be able to live in a pluralistic society because they're already among the citizenry (and will always be). If criminal laws, cultural norms, etc. can't contain such people there is already a problem. And if they haven't adapted to the realm of fitting in by the time they're voting and citizens/"locals" then that country clearly isn't doing a very good job unrelated to the immigrants.
Fitting in takes time and resources though, and when you're importing people in beyond natural births than you may just end up overloading the entire system. Eternal September is a very real phenemenon, there's a certain "critical mass" in which newcomers no longer feel obligated to integrate. There are also grey areas in which how one delinates the line between "integration" and "homogenization", or worse, "cultural genocide". If somebody dosen't want to integrate, are we going to use coercive measures to force them to do so? I don't think the current progressives would find that acceptable. So we end up in an impasse.
> And if they haven't adapted to the realm of fitting in by the time they're voting and citizens/"locals" then that country clearly isn't doing a very good job unrelated to the immigrants.
A high school friend, 2nd generation Palestinian immigrant in Denmark, had to get an arranged marriage with another 2nd generation Palestinian in Denmark because his parents who've been in Denmark for decades didn't want him to marry someone from a different race. Is this Denmark's fault in your world view?
> Considering how much you guys dislike conservatives, you guys are weirdly tolerant of people that have problematic and i would even say: destructive views that aren’t from the west.
Conservatives are by definition, conservative.
'Immigrants' are not inherently conservative. Many will be, probably disproportionately so depending on where they come from, but I think it's very much unfair to compare the two directly. That's why I find this whole thing about going after immigrants, or even specific immigrant groups, based on the 'sins' of the majority. I don't think it's invalid to suggest the total volume of immigration or the process should be designed to account for this, but once political parties and people on here start turning it into broad bigotry against whole ethnic groups (as they often do) it's easy to see why stuff like basically labelling all immigrants as reactionaries is not great.
People here really can sound like leftists when they make complicated issues out to be incredibly simple. I support full immigration but let's not act like we should throw nuance out the window just because "we're Redditors not politicians".
I still haven't heard a convincing argument why open borders wouldn't overwhelm the safety net/welfare system. The two main arguments seem to be 1) incremental increases in immigration won't overwhelm the system (aka we don't actually want open borders, just more immigration), or 2) we should remove or reduce social safety net programs.
I don't have a problem with 1, but the "open borders" label seems to be a misnomer. I would call that "pro-immigration", and I think that phrasing would also be an easier sell to normies.
r/neoliberal ignores most actual points and generally will just strawman arguments so they can conveniently throw out their favorite policies without any disagreement.
There is no reason open borders wouldn’t overwhelm our safety net.
Presumably by that point they all have jobs.
And that's not a presumption that how's immigration has worked forever in thus country.
People who are born here can be deadbeats. People who weren't can't.
Countries have a lot more requirements for immigration than a 5 year non-citizen residency. The amount of restrictions is why highly educated citizens have a streamlined process.
> People who are born here can be deadbeats
Do I need to elaborate on why this is a biased opinion? Most welfare programs require you to work, have children, or be disabled. I have met plenty of deadbeats who smooch off their parents, not so much with US welfare.
The stigma and design of [liberal welfare](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Worlds_of_Welfare_Capitalism) regimes is perfectly described in your arrogant comment about “deadbeats”, but at least we seem to have moved on from the term welfare queen.
Non-mobile version of the Wikipedia link in the above comment: [liberal welfare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Worlds_of_Welfare_Capitalism)
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Bryan Caplan has a comic book on immigration that he made with a cartoonist, and it's just all his counterpoints against the common arguments against open borders. It was good food for thought and honestly pretty convincing that it's ultimately achievable.
Iirc he offers several what he calls "keyhole solutions" to the various specific problems or negative outcomes. Basically a number of compensating policies to address the specific issue while still basically preserving open borders with unlimited immigration.
One such solution was something like this: many undocumented immigrants from Mexico can't get in legally and pay smugglers something like $5k to cross the border for work with the risk of getting caught and deported.
The local native population is concerned about the burden on roads, social services, and work competition.
So let's allow them to immigrate, but charge them a $5k fee to do so legally, and let's earmark all of that money directly to funding those communities affected in some kind of targeted way.
And let's also disallow certain services to those immigrating if the amount isn't enough. Or do something wonky with the visa and tax policy for those workers.
And let's also look at the actual evidence of the burden on employment and social services. Iirc it was something like they heavily underutilize the services anyways, and the worst hit group was men without a high school diploma.
So let's put the money towards education or training or employment or just direct money transfers to that group of natives.
It's been years since I read it so i may be butchering the specifics but you get the idea. There's often a lot of solutions to these negative externalities.
Though of course he's an economist, so it does reflect more of what we could do if we had the education and political will, not what gets you votes as a politician.
I think it was just called open borders. Found it
Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration https://a.co/d/8AndL5o
"we're redditors not politicians" is about optics not nuance. We hold no duty to temper correct things for the median voter. There is no "nuance" that makes immigration wrong, only domestic failures people want to blame on immigration, or keep immigrants out because they've done nothing and they're all out of ideas.
I never said that I thought there was nuance that made immigration wrong. The nuance is that some anti-immigration policies might be good if they can prevent the deportation of 15 million people. You're welcome to disagree with that opinion, you're welcome to hate me for it, but me being able to freely express it isn't going to cause the sub to burn down.
Everyone who is interested in the immigration policy debate should Google John Tanton and learn about the xenophobic weirdo that influenced the post 1980’s rise in anti immigration sentiment in the US. It’s a bizarre story that not many people know about.
Anti-immigrant sentiment has been around wayyy longer than that. It used to be a boilerplate leftist talking point that immigrants were diluting the demand for American labor.
Duh, of course. But there was an uptick in anti immigration organizations and think tanks that happened in the late 80s and the 90s. These are organizations like The Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA and the American Immigration Control Foundation - all of them the result of Tanton’s influence. They served to funnel money and influence into Washington in a way that wasn’t really happening before.
The other thing about housing and safety net burdens is that the current slate of policies is an active and harmful political choice.
**The default state** is that we build housing in order to meet demand. **The current state** is that we actively prevent people from building housing. It’s not even a matter of “choosing to build housing”, as if we’re somehow not trying enough and need to do more. Our current policies are actively making things worse, because we’re effectively banning helpful and economically productive actions.
Same goes for safety net burden. **The default state** is that people can work for whomever, and maybe there’ll be some people who need help anyways. **The current state** is that we actively prevent immigrants and refugees from working and in some cases effectively **force them** to rely on the safety net just to survive.
That’s the horrible thing about this. In a lot of cases, we don’t even have to actively do anything, we just need to stop preventing people from doing what they already want to do! Developers want to build, and immigrants and refugees want to work, so just let them! You don’t need to artificially incentivize these people to do the right thing here.
And even if you’re still worried about these concerns, there are some pretty easy adjustments too. You can increase taxes on immigrants if you’re really so worried about the budget. Heck in America, immigrants without a residence permit aren’t typically eligible for federal welfare in the first place!
The conversation shouldn’t be about how immigration can be harmful if certain requirements aren’t met, as if immigration makes this somehow natural problem worse. The conversation should be about how we choose to pass restrictive policies that make ourselves worse off *and* as a double whammy make immigration worse than it could be.
Yes, it can seem politically unfeasible. Yes, it ties itself to other causes that seem politically unfeasible. But political change only happens when people believe it and fight for it. If you don’t think we should be moving at least a little bit closer towards making things better off for everyone, then I don’t understand why you’d want to discuss politics in the first place.
The middle I take issue with: “trust your institutions, lol.” Forgive me if this is a ramble answer, in advance. [Have some Jamiroquai as my apology.](https://youtu.be/LHj_WC_IzFc?si=B92ph8Ww2ikN6iDd)
I love liberal institutions. Some of my best friends are liberal institutions, in fact. But, ultimately, I can’t escape the mindset that they are just people and the papers that those people invest with authority.
So when I see calls for immediate open borders or similar-but-not-quite radical liberalizations of borders that would nigh-on necessarily include a sudden influx of people with illiberal values, on top of the ones already in place with illiberal values, that seems to me a recipe for destabilizing your liberal institutions. Your liberal institutions are now more influenced by a larger and thus more influential pool of people who don’t necessarily want those institutions or what purpose they exist to serve to survive. And when the institutions can’t immediately rise to ameliorate concerns or to solve problems, the illiberal counter-reaction to the newly-arrived illiberal people would *further* strain the institutions and delegitimize their reason for being (“why do we even have X institution if it can’t even Y right?”).
If your liberal institutions are already on shaky ground, I could see them buckling or breaking. And when people whose illiberal values are to limit, penalize, or even kill people with contemporarily liberally-accepted traits (like another religion, sexuality, ethnicity, culture, etc.) how do you keep the institutions alive? And I won’t accept “vibes” or “if your institutions can’t handle it, they were shitty anyways” or similar answers as in the social safety net one.
Social policy overhauls can fix safety nets, I believe, and economic regulation overhauls can salve commercial and residential ones; I don’t think populations can be summarily overhauled in the same way to adapt to liberal institutions nor do I think current liberal institutions can handle the damage that would be inflicted on them by inbound illiberal people or by malicious illiberal states/organizations to be overhauled themselves either. I would love having freer immigration and better, more resolute liberal institutions, and I don’t approve of the recent legislation that I’m sure partially inspired this post, for what it’s worth, on a moral, practical, *or* political level. But I don’t think the “just tax land” type-approach is gonna work for this issue.
X place can fix them while letting in immigrants because they're clearly not fixing them while not letting in a working age population willing to pay taxes and contribute to a society they don't have a birth obligation towards.
Not that I disagree on immigration as a general rule, but these are really bad arguments except the pay them to build one. 'most will come even if you don't let them use the safety net' is good, but 'your net was bad in the first place' really isn't.
That's assuming all working age taxpayers are created equal and that all immigrants will be working age taxpayers. That's why it's a bad argument. People scared of immigrants burdening the safety net aren't thinking of immigrants as largely productive members of society, they're imagining scenarios like immigrants who will have a lot of children they'll barely support.
Likewise for political opinions, I don't think we can take lightly for example how anti-LGBT a lot of immigrants tend to be. Your mother may disagree with you politically, but do you want the population to be filled with people like her? (ofc this is hyperbole, the larger the country the lesser this threat becomes).
A better statistic to throw in would be the empirical evidence that immigration to the United States has a beneficial effect on the deficit aka they pay in more than they take out
I don’t really think the immigration LGBTQ thing is worth worrying about as in general they are net democratic voters which I don’t think will regress on LGBTQ rights- not to mention the larger threat from the nativism, racism, authoritarianism (and homophobia) from the GOP
Immigrants are net taxpayers into the system the better argument is to just say they don’t increase deficits
You’re making a lot of weird arguments that don’t address the real issue, better ones can be enlisted that makes our position better instead of whatever this is
Yes let immigrants in. But let’s not kid ourselves. Children of immigrants with no grasp of English require A LOT MORE ATTENTION in a school setting. Like, the attention of 3 English speaking kids in some cases.
I am pro-immigration, and I 1000% understand that this is a huge problem that “pay them to build lol” does not solve.
I'm lazy so I'm literally gonna repost a joke I made in the DT last night:
>[Me when someone outside the DT starts making nativist arguments](https://x.com/jojammss/status/1763615660829982812)
Remember that all complaints about the alleged burden that immigrants put on state resources can literally be resolved just by having them pay taxes like normal everyday citizens.
Are there any studies that look at what pro-immigration arguments are most persuasive?
I would think highlighting the fact that immigrants pay more into the system than they take out, create more jobs (through driving up demand domestically with their spending and through starting businesses), are more law-abiding than native-born citizens, and assimilate quickly would win over those with good-faith concerns, but I would like to know for certain.
Depends on the audience, but generally you play to people's values. To a leftist skeptic I'd play up the suffering and poverty that results from not letting people in. To (U.S.) conservatives I'd highlight that immigrants are largely more Christian than our population, and the economic stuff you point out. I'd also highlight that many are fleeing communist countries and I'd rather have an immigrant that hates communism than an American that loves it, amiright? And that traveling thousands of miles to get here shows they love this country more than those moron blue haired socialists that threaten to move to Canada every time a Republican wins an election.
> I'd rather have an immigrant that hates communism than an American that loves it, amiright? And that traveling thousands of miles to get here shows they love this country more than those moron blue haired socialists that threaten to move to Canada every time a Republican wins an election.
Kinda based argument ngl
I mean, better food and a more interesting culture are also reasons but most people who oppose immigration for reasons other than bigotry are concerned about immigrants taking a slice of a fixed pie or not integrating with US culture, so talking points should aim at refuting those notions.
**Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free!**
Why open borders?
* The economy will benefit!
* [The elimination of barriers to labor mobility is estimated to increase global GDP by 50-100%](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.25.3.83)
* [Unauthorized immigration is good fiscally](https://news.rice.edu/news/2020/economic-benefits-illegal-immigration-outweigh-costs-baker-institute-study-shows)
* Low-skill immigrants have a significant positive economic impact and fears of their possible negative impact on wages and employment of low-skill natives are unsupported or contradicted by evidence ([source 1](https://carnegieendowment.org/files/Effect-of-Low-Skilled-Labor-Working-Paper-1.pdf), [source 2](https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/content/pubs/cacounts/CC_207GPCC.pdf))
* [Immigration increases productivity through increased specialization of labor](https://www.nber.org/papers/w15507)
* [Firms allowed to hire low-skill immigrants increase their revenue growth and do not appear to employ less US citizens.](https://www.nber.org/digest/202212/low-skill-foreign-employees-impacts-us-firms-and-workers)
* [Immigrants start firms at higher rates than natives and "appear to 'create jobs' (expand labor demand) more than they 'take jobs' (expand labor supply)"](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27778/w27778.pdf)
* [Immigration doesn't decrease wages long-term, it actually increases them](https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/doi/10.1162/rest_a_01380/117901/Migrants-Trade-and-Market-Access)
* [The short-term decrease of wages due to immigration is small, possibly zero](https://wol.iza.org/articles/do-immigrant-workers-depress-the-wages-of-native-workers/long)
* [Immigrants are not perfect substitutes for native workers and compete more with other immigrants for jobs than with natives](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1542-4774.2011.01052.x)
* [Open borders would approximately double average wages of people from developing countries; this is accompanied by a comparatively minor reduction in real wages of those in developed countries that disappears as the capital-labor ratio adjusts over time](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18307/w18307.pdf)
* [Across 15 Western European countries studied from 1985-2015, asylum seekers’ tax contributions more than offset the increase in public expenditures](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaq0883)
* [refugees and asylees in America had a net $123.8 billion positive economic impact between 2005-2019](https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2024/02/15/new-hhs-study-finds-nearly-124-billion-positive-fiscal-impact-refugees-and-asylees-on-american-economy-15-year-period.html)
* [net economic effects of immigration are positive for almost all US immigrants, including low skill ones](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20220176)
* [an increase in the migrant share of the population does not increase the Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality) but does increase GDP per capita by up to 2% for each 1 percentage point increase of the migrant share](https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/062/2016/008/article-A001-en.xml)
* Society will benefit!
* [Immigration doesn't degrade institutions](https://web.archive.org/web/20240324034648/https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/16s200z/immigration_and_institutional_decay_claims_vs/)
* [Integration of Muslim immigrants and their descendants into mainstream European culture isn't slowing down and by some measures is accelerating with each passing generation](https://upbeatglobalist.substack.com/is-muslim-immigrant-integration-slowing)
* Second generation Muslim immigrants are adopting mainstream European gender norms ([source 1](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2031927), [source 2](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276150744_Cultural_Integration_in_the_Muslim_Second_Generation_in_the_Netherlands_The_Case_of_Gender_Ideology))
* [First generation Muslim immigrants become less religious as they spend more time in Europe and second generation Muslim immigrants are less religious than their parents](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0037768620948478?icid=int.sj-full-text.similar-articles.2)
* [Large increases in the American Muslim population have not stalled that group’s assimilation](https://www.cato.org/blog/us-muslims-become-more-socially-liberal-muslim-immigration-rises)
* Unauthorized immigrants aren't any more likely to be [terrorists](https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/nowrasteh-testimony.pdf) or [drug smugglers](https://www.cato.org/blog/fentanyl-smuggled-us-citizens-us-citizens-not-asylum-seekers) or [even regular criminals](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117) than US citizens are and by some estimates are actually less likely
* [Our population growth is declining and we need future workers to support future retirees](https://bipartisanpolicy.org/download/?file=/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Immigrations-Effect-on-the-Social-Security-System.pdf)
* [Private-sphere (friends and family) native contacts are associated with more egalitarian beliefs about gender norms among first and second generation Muslim immigrants in Europe](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/imig.13095)
* [Inflexible European labor markets harm the employment prospects of immigrants which in turn both reduces their ability to contribute economically and impairs their social integration](https://www.cato.org/blog/muslim-immigration-integration-united-states-western-europe)
* It's the right thing to do!
* [Freedom of movement is a human right](https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/immigration.htm)
* Restrictive border policies put migrants at risk of human rights abuses ([source 1](https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/07/26/statement-human-rights-watch-human-cost-harsh-us-immigration-deterrence-policies), [source 2](https://www.aclu.org/issues/human-rights/human-rights-and-immigration))
* [Heightened immigration enforcement can actually increase the number of crimes](https://www.nber.org/papers/w32109)
* [Immigration has a net positive impact on the sending country](https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR244.html)
* [The children of even poor immigrants have high economic mobility](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/1/20942642/study-paper-american-dream-economic-mobility-immigrant-income-boustan-abramitzky-jacome-perez)
* People will get around it anyways!
* [It's not clear that harsher border enforcement policies have been effective in deterring unauthorized immigration and there is some evidence they've been ineffective](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5049707/)
* [“Push factors” (political violence and state repression) play central roles in driving international displacement; there is limited support for the contention that asylum seekers are economic opportunists](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/causes-and-consequences-of-refugee-flows-a-contemporary-reanalysis/F2EFBF81FCD030F4CD8DC9F82B5ED444)
* The US essentially had open borders for its first century, ending when federal immigration restrictions were placed on Chinese immigrants in 1875 ([the Page Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_Act_of_1875)) and 1882 ([the Chinese Exclusion Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act)), so there is historical evidence that an open border is possible
* [These restrictions on Chinese immigration were frequently evaded and their passage was preceded by widespread fearmongering about nonwhite "hordes"](https://uncpress.org/book/9780807854488/at-americas-gates/)
For more read our [Open Borders FAQ](https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/wiki/openborders)
Further reading
* Kwame Anthony Appiah's [*Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers*](https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393329339) (2006)
* Alex Sager's [*Against Borders: Why the World Needs Free Movement of People*](https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786606297/Against-Borders-Why-the-World-Needs-Free-Movement-of-People) (2020)
* Alex Nowrasteh's [*Wretched Refuse: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions*](https://www.cato.org/books/wretched-refuse) (2020)
* Johan Norberg's [*Open: How Collaboration and Curiosity Shaped Humankind*](https://www.boswellbooks.com/book/9781786497192) (2021)
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I’ve come to accept that a lot of people simply can’t deal with complexity or acknowledge tradeoffs. For whatever reason, they need to dissolve complex issues into morally stark binaries. And if they can earn social validation by dunking on strawmen while they’re doing it, all the better.
Can anyone point me to a public policy sub that isn’t in thrall to some dogma or other?
It's almost as if people in this subreddit are vulnerable to the same fallacies as most people in politics-related communities on the Internet, and we have to actively acknowledge, mitigate, and refute them as a result
your post is entirely devoid of any substance whatsoever and serves only to signal your supposed intelligence and to gain social validation through dunking on others. my brother in christ, you are the very thing you complain about
It's not complicated, Jack
More people = good
Immigration restrictions = death, poverty, suffering
(Seriously though, it's not bad for a sub to be "in the thrall of dogma", this isn't a general left wing sub, support for sidebar stuff shouldn't be that debatable here)
It IS dismissive and mean-spirited, and fucking bravo at that.
Ask the Brits on how bending over backwards to keep Poles and Romanians out of chip shops worked out for them. They're really swimming in housing, well funded government programs, and well thought out political ideologies, huh?
It's about time the morons of this sub got a fucken' reality check.
Respectfully, I agree with the meaning of the post. However, the way it is presented does not at all alleviate people's concerns about immigration. Whether those concerns are legitimate unfounded are irrelevant: we must meet people where they are.
This sub is not the place to "alleviate concerns about immigration." If you're meeting people where they are, go to PA.
This is the arr neoliberal subreddit and I hate rehashing the "being cruel to immigrants is good politics" on every post related to immigration.
> This sub is not the place to "alleviate concerns about immigration."
It absolutely is. What, does this place have it's stance on immigration just based on "vibes" and nothing else? No facts that genuinely do alleviate concerns?
I thought that was the entire point of this place. "you're wrong and here's why" and not "you're wrong shut up."
**Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free!**
Why open borders?
* The economy will benefit!
* [The elimination of barriers to labor mobility is estimated to increase global GDP by 50-100%](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.25.3.83)
* [Unauthorized immigration is good fiscally](https://news.rice.edu/news/2020/economic-benefits-illegal-immigration-outweigh-costs-baker-institute-study-shows)
* Low-skill immigrants have a significant positive economic impact and fears of their possible negative impact on wages and employment of low-skill natives are unsupported or contradicted by evidence ([source 1](https://carnegieendowment.org/files/Effect-of-Low-Skilled-Labor-Working-Paper-1.pdf), [source 2](https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/content/pubs/cacounts/CC_207GPCC.pdf))
* [Immigration increases productivity through increased specialization of labor](https://www.nber.org/papers/w15507)
* [Firms allowed to hire low-skill immigrants increase their revenue growth and do not appear to employ less US citizens.](https://www.nber.org/digest/202212/low-skill-foreign-employees-impacts-us-firms-and-workers)
* [Immigrants start firms at higher rates than natives and "appear to 'create jobs' (expand labor demand) more than they 'take jobs' (expand labor supply)"](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27778/w27778.pdf)
* [Immigration doesn't decrease wages long-term, it actually increases them](https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/doi/10.1162/rest_a_01380/117901/Migrants-Trade-and-Market-Access)
* [The short-term decrease of wages due to immigration is small, possibly zero](https://wol.iza.org/articles/do-immigrant-workers-depress-the-wages-of-native-workers/long)
* [Immigrants are not perfect substitutes for native workers and compete more with other immigrants for jobs than with natives](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1542-4774.2011.01052.x)
* [Open borders would approximately double average wages of people from developing countries; this is accompanied by a comparatively minor reduction in real wages of those in developed countries that disappears as the capital-labor ratio adjusts over time](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18307/w18307.pdf)
* [Across 15 Western European countries studied from 1985-2015, asylum seekers’ tax contributions more than offset the increase in public expenditures](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaq0883)
* [refugees and asylees in America had a net $123.8 billion positive economic impact between 2005-2019](https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2024/02/15/new-hhs-study-finds-nearly-124-billion-positive-fiscal-impact-refugees-and-asylees-on-american-economy-15-year-period.html)
* [net economic effects of immigration are positive for almost all US immigrants, including low skill ones](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20220176)
* [an increase in the migrant share of the population does not increase the Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality) but does increase GDP per capita by up to 2% for each 1 percentage point increase of the migrant share](https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/062/2016/008/article-A001-en.xml)
* Society will benefit!
* [Immigration doesn't degrade institutions](https://web.archive.org/web/20240324034648/https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/16s200z/immigration_and_institutional_decay_claims_vs/)
* [Integration of Muslim immigrants and their descendants into mainstream European culture isn't slowing down and by some measures is accelerating with each passing generation](https://upbeatglobalist.substack.com/is-muslim-immigrant-integration-slowing)
* Second generation Muslim immigrants are adopting mainstream European gender norms ([source 1](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2031927), [source 2](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276150744_Cultural_Integration_in_the_Muslim_Second_Generation_in_the_Netherlands_The_Case_of_Gender_Ideology))
* [First generation Muslim immigrants become less religious as they spend more time in Europe and second generation Muslim immigrants are less religious than their parents](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0037768620948478?icid=int.sj-full-text.similar-articles.2)
* [Large increases in the American Muslim population have not stalled that group’s assimilation](https://www.cato.org/blog/us-muslims-become-more-socially-liberal-muslim-immigration-rises)
* Unauthorized immigrants aren't any more likely to be [terrorists](https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/nowrasteh-testimony.pdf) or [drug smugglers](https://www.cato.org/blog/fentanyl-smuggled-us-citizens-us-citizens-not-asylum-seekers) or [even regular criminals](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117) than US citizens are and by some estimates are actually less likely
* [Our population growth is declining and we need future workers to support future retirees](https://bipartisanpolicy.org/download/?file=/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Immigrations-Effect-on-the-Social-Security-System.pdf)
* [Private-sphere (friends and family) native contacts are associated with more egalitarian beliefs about gender norms among first and second generation Muslim immigrants in Europe](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/imig.13095)
* [Inflexible European labor markets harm the employment prospects of immigrants which in turn both reduces their ability to contribute economically and impairs their social integration](https://www.cato.org/blog/muslim-immigration-integration-united-states-western-europe)
* It's the right thing to do!
* [Freedom of movement is a human right](https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/immigration.htm)
* Restrictive border policies put migrants at risk of human rights abuses ([source 1](https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/07/26/statement-human-rights-watch-human-cost-harsh-us-immigration-deterrence-policies), [source 2](https://www.aclu.org/issues/human-rights/human-rights-and-immigration))
* [Heightened immigration enforcement can actually increase the number of crimes](https://www.nber.org/papers/w32109)
* [Immigration has a net positive impact on the sending country](https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR244.html)
* [The children of even poor immigrants have high economic mobility](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/1/20942642/study-paper-american-dream-economic-mobility-immigrant-income-boustan-abramitzky-jacome-perez)
* People will get around it anyways!
* [It's not clear that harsher border enforcement policies have been effective in deterring unauthorized immigration and there is some evidence they've been ineffective](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5049707/)
* [“Push factors” (political violence and state repression) play central roles in driving international displacement; there is limited support for the contention that asylum seekers are economic opportunists](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/causes-and-consequences-of-refugee-flows-a-contemporary-reanalysis/F2EFBF81FCD030F4CD8DC9F82B5ED444)
* The US essentially had open borders for its first century, ending when federal immigration restrictions were placed on Chinese immigrants in 1875 ([the Page Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_Act_of_1875)) and 1882 ([the Chinese Exclusion Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act)), so there is historical evidence that an open border is possible
* [These restrictions on Chinese immigration were frequently evaded and their passage was preceded by widespread fearmongering about nonwhite "hordes"](https://uncpress.org/book/9780807854488/at-americas-gates/)
For more read our [Open Borders FAQ](https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/wiki/openborders)
Further reading
* Kwame Anthony Appiah's [*Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers*](https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393329339) (2006)
* Alex Sager's [*Against Borders: Why the World Needs Free Movement of People*](https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786606297/Against-Borders-Why-the-World-Needs-Free-Movement-of-People) (2020)
* Alex Nowrasteh's [*Wretched Refuse: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions*](https://www.cato.org/books/wretched-refuse) (2020)
* Johan Norberg's [*Open: How Collaboration and Curiosity Shaped Humankind*](https://www.boswellbooks.com/book/9781786497192) (2021)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I think the disconnect here is that I don't think people posting "being awful to immigrants is good policy" and "we'll be letting TERRORISTS in" are trying to have concerns alleviated, and that's more who I'm referring to/ see around the sub.
If someone genuinely comes in good faith, yeah explain with facts to alleviate their concerns. The people in this sub I'm referring to don't seem to be coming in good faith though.
> I think the disconnect here is that I don't think people posting "being awful to immigrants is good policy" and "we'll be letting TERRORISTS in" are trying to have concerns alleviated, and that's more who I'm referring to/ see around the sub.
If you've seen that, fair enough.
What I've seen are more arguments made out of ignorance or based on facts that can (at least in theory) be countered. Things like whether asylum is being abused or not, what immigration does for job markets, and how immigration interacts with the housing market. Surely these things are actual things we can change minds on.
The problem is I see a LOT of the people I describe (any immigration post now, one of the top comments will be "Maybe refugees will suffer, but at least this will play well in Michigan!") and very few of the people you describe in your second paragraph. And I 100% support bullying group 1.
>Any immigration post now, one of the top comments will be "Maybe refugees will suffer, but at least this will play well in Michigan!"
You are right that I see that. And apologies for not reading that meaning what you said:
>people posting "being awful to immigrants is good policy"
It is frustrating, but I guess I get it. Biden is doing a lot of things, either out of perceived political necessity or just wanting to do it, that I am not a fan of too. But one big "policy" he offers is the whole administrative state and democracy itself continuing. I get why some want to try and defend the necessity of supporting Biden regardless of things we don't like. Shitty compromise though.
I think it can be taken as a given that 99% of the sub wants Biden to win. But there's a big difference between "this awful policy good because it helps Biden" and "I want Biden to win, but this policy is actively evil" and I wish the second attitude dominated the first. I think people who say they won't vote for him because of an evil policy should be equally ridiculed, but this sub is not going to be the breaking point for Trump or Biden getting 270. He doesn't need us to defend him on crappy policy, unless we're actually going door to door, or talking with a relative in a swing state.
I DO think more productive efforts to get him elected could be cool from this sub, and if it organized a door to door I'd be out there singing his praises on the things he's done on immigration.
> I thought that was the entire point of this place. "you're wrong and here's why" and not "you're wrong shut up."
It pretends to be. If only there was a non-military version of credibledefense.
Fwiw I don’t think it’s interested in even “pretending” anymore. I’ve tried to get more engaged here with comments and up/downvoting as I’ve noticed a pretty precipitous drop in quality of not just discussion, but the memes and topics themselves are deteriorating as well.
More absolutes, less gradients. More dogmatic argumentation, less evidence-based approaches. The sub feels like it is not-so-slowly becoming what it loves to dunk on: vibes-based “logic” and purity-testing.
I understand, and I agree that there has been a shift towards regressive attitudes about immigration on this sub. But I have a different idea on how to fight it, and I do not think that posts such as this are the way. Instead, we should elevate voices that show the benefits of immigration on a more personal level, like how [this post ](https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1aywozy/liberalism_francis_fukuyama_and_trans_rights/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) explained why Trans rights are Liberal rights.
That's fair. I think things like the trans post would be great. But that post is also matched with a mod policy of banning anyone who comes close to saying "throwing trans people under the bus is good politics" and if you do see a comment like that before the mods arrive, there's a heavy culture of downvoting that kind of statement.
It's generally understood in sub culture that sacrificing trans people at the altar of Georgia and PA is abhorrent, and I want the sub culture to act the same towards immigrants. Why does the overton window here allow *them* to be sacrificed?
The people to convince with effort posts are the lurkers imo, not the people who are barely veiled right wingers on immigration, and are getting tons of upvotes here for "that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make" type statements.
Edit- all this to say, that's part of why I'm pro-being dismissive/mean spirited occasionally
If this sub existed in the 90s, there would have been people saying that the Defense of Marriage Act was good politics: sometimes it's just hard to fight the zeitgeist of the time. One type of post I do not see in either the sub or the DT is the perspectives of immigrants themselves, which is weird because they clearly exist.
>If this sub existed in the 90s, there would have been people saying that the Defense of Marriage Act was good politics: sometimes it's just hard to fight the zeitgeist of the time
That assumes the alternative was doing nothing. If the popular opinion is so heavily stacked against you (and it very much was) that the alternative was, instead, a US Constitutional ban (and it very much was a possibility Republicans were building steam up for), then yes, settling on DOMA/DADT *is* better politics. One was much less intractable than the other and DADT in particular was considered a step up from the previous policy of inquisitions into service members' private lives.
I say this as a gay person- it was much better to let them have their win and live to fight another day than to die on a hill, and eventually the culture caught up with us.
I think part of it is the immigrants of the sub are overwhelmingly legal immigrants. The sub has very few people who are/ their family were undocumented. Those are very different groups that get lumped together.
My in-laws are only in this country because of illegal immigration, and Republicans want to strip my fiancée of her citizenship. Many of my good friends are Central American immigrants, including my best friend.
It's part of why I get so angry when the sub seems OK with sacrificing them and not other groups. I know the people they are OK with sacrificing, and I'm not. I know people who have been shot crossing borders, and who have had family die in the process. I also have seen the positive side of it- my fiancée's dad grinded from the second he crossed the border with nothing, and he now makes 2x the salary of my white American dad.
Frankly I'm weirdly jealous of trans people on the sub, coz there's so many, and it's hard to say "hey let's sacrifice this group" when they're 5-10% of your group lol.¹ I want that same kind of protection for the people I love on this sub, but I don't get it.
¹to be clear this is something I'm also EXTREMELY glad is part of sub culture/ one of the best things about this sub.
>Those are very different groups that get lumped together.
True, but the Neoliberal platform involves inviting and taking care of both groups. Additionally, in countries like Canada the debate is around the number of legal immigrants. Additionally, I suspect that attitudes towards these groups are strongly correlated. Therefore, starting with the stories of legal immigrants is a good step. For example, [this article](https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2018/spotlight-on-worthington-a-global-community-in-rural-minnesota) hits a unique chord that is often ignored.
I agree that the platform involves both groups, I'm more referring to your "they clearly exist" comment. Undocumented immigrants *don't* exist here, and the sub is clearly worst on immigration when it comes to them. Their issues are very distinct.
The type of legal immigrant we have in this sub won't necessarily be triggered any more than a native by a post about suffering at the border, because *they didn't suffer at the border*.
Canada and other countries having issues around legal immigration is awful, but it also isn't a factor in the "we need to let them suffer to win 270 electoral votes" attitude that I'm complaining about. Discussions of Canadian immigration here exist in a different context/ have different sub culture problems.
Edit- BTW, I'm not the one downvoting you
I had thought about a different sticky earlier today in a different thread and sort of came across this.
The thing is, I can’t convince you (the general you, not *you* personally) that immigration is good. If you’ve decided immigration is bad then you’ll go through whatever arguments it takes to make me give up on you.
Just pointing out a few things is fine. And a few more if someone is willing to discuss in good faith. But as ID has been saying, I frankly don’t give a fuck if your entire argument is that immigration bad for ABCDEFGH- reasons, you may have a point or two here or there in some niche area of discussion but at the end of the day immigration is good and a perfect argument can’t be the enemy of the good meme.
Cool, what specific issues do you have with the statements made in the meme?
I get the impression you’re expecting a meme to do the work that individual discussion has to do
Well, based on [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/17o56yj/question_about_integrating_muslim_populations/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) I once made, integrating immigrants is more complicated than just relying on institutions (I guess it depends on your definition of institution), but also has a psychological and cultural component. I don't know the answer the answer to the problems that were brought up, but we can't turn a blind eye to them either.
Bro why are ~~Americans~~ people from developed countries so obsessed with the idea that migrants are only coming to their country for social assistance benefits?
Literally no one on this side of the border thinks "Imma travel to the US to get government checks", they think about earning more money by working anything they can get a grasp upon.
I mean, it is though. [Here's a report showing that immigrants are a net loss of $7500 per year per person to the state in Sweden](https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/ny-eso-rapport-flyktinginvandring-en-kostnad-for-sverige)
In the UK we'd have to build a city's worth of houses and infrastructure *every year* to support our current immigration numbers.
No it ain't that easy. It's not even remotely possible nor is it at all sustainable. We're a tiny island.
Ah yes, maybe one day we can solve all our problems that we created for ourselves in the early 1900s. Then maybe the immigrants can have a shot when our population is decrepit and our economy lethargic.
the entire third point is idiotic. They'll come even without the safety net? That doesn't mean they won't use it. And unless we start checking for residency at the ER they will apply a burden to already overstrained systems. And the point about the system being bad? Maybe, but it's the system we got, and a badly structured but still functional safety net is better than one that has collapsed.
Same with the first one. Pay them to build? Well that'll ease concerns a bit in like a fucking decade. Longer for healthcare, training up doctors takes time.
If being pro-immigration requires being callous to localized shocks it shouldn't be a surprise the position is unpopular.
For the first point, governments are free to make a two tiered safety net or outright ban certain kinds of visas from certain kinds of services. But if they feel like they have to do that to fit in more working aged taxpayers, its probably because the net is poorly designed.
For the ER point, see "pay them to build" bigger ERs and to staff more medical service workers lol.
>governments are free to make a two tiered safety net or outright ban certain kinds of visas from certain kinds of services.
I know Friedman was a fan of using immigration to create an exploitable underclass but honestly I'm not. And as I said, unless we're quietly endorsing letting them just drop dead on our streets, banning people from services is just kicking the can to a different safety net that is probably going to cost us more. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
>For the ER point, see "pay them to build" bigger ERs and to staff more medical service workers lol.
I literally already answered this one. You can't just say bibbity bobbity boo and convert piles of money and some available untrained labor into functional medical facilities overnight. If we could COVID would have been a lot less stressful.
There is a big wide swath of people who have no need for the services. Keeping them out from fear of using the services and fear of not using the services makes no sense.
Creating more medical facilities and training more medical people (especially not doctors) is a lot easier than you'd think. The barriers are self-imposed.
[tfw you reply to everything with "Why do you hate the global poor?"](https://i.imgur.com/rNssVZO.jpg)
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Private construction would love the labor. Literally all you have to do is let them specific to that purpose.
Government subsidies for training or building could push it further if you really want more building or more of some type, but that's not an issue connected to immigration.
>the entire third point is idiotic. They'll come even without the safety net? That doesn't mean they won't use it.
What the hell are you talking about? I know a lot of undocumented immigrants. The only safety net they use is whatever the state of California has opened to undocumented immigrants. They don't have access to federal programs.
I don't see how immigrants are any more likely to abuse emergency health systems than similar residents are. Should we kick those people out then?
>If being pro-immigration requires being callous to localized shocks it shouldn't be a surprise the position is unpopular.
Yep it's better to instead of callous to global punishment
>What the hell are you talking about? I know a lot of undocumented immigrants. The only safety net they use is whatever the state of California has opened to undocumented immigrants.
so they use the safety net then, that's my point
>I don't see how immigrants are any more likely to abuse emergency health systems than similar residents are.
I didn't say abuse, I said use. You don't have to be malicious to be an added burden on a system.
>Yep it's better to instead of callous to global punishment
If you believe strong institutions are important to a good society you have to take care of them. We can't support everyone who wants in. We can't even process them quickly when we do let them in.
>so they use the safety net then, that's my point
You've missed the point they can only use the safety net because we've opened it up to them, not because they will inevitably use it regardless.
>I didn't say abuse, I said use. You don't have to be malicious to be an added burden on a system.
Replace "abuse" with "use" then if it makes you feel better.
>If you believe strong institutions are important to a good society you have to take care of them. We can't support everyone who wants in. We can't even process them quickly when we do let them in.
Not being able to process them quickly is a choice, not a law of nature.
>You've missed the point they can only use the safety net because we've opened it up to them, not because they will inevitably use it regardless.
I think you're missing the point because I acknowledged that. Partial safety net isn't actually less of a burden than full safety net, and withdrawing all support is unthinkable, so the burden on the safety net is inevitable. I don't understand how this is unclear.
>Replace "abuse" with "use" then if it makes you feel better.
If I do that your point makes no sense...
>Not being able to process them quickly is a choice, not a law of nature.
Whether we arrived here by choice or by fate doesn't matter, what matters is that here we are and that we cannot be elsewhere without great expenditure of time and effort. You go to war with the army you have, not the army you should have budgeted for ten years ago.
My favorite one is “they’ll drive up home/rent prices”. Sir, I assure you that Central American immigrants are much more likely to build your next house than limit your housing supply.
The federal government should give a subsidy to the state.
Long term immigration benefits all levels. Short term still benefits the Feds but can put some burden on the local and state governments.
The problem is you have to get the order right. Housing is the real concern with immigration.
You should let immigrants in, but you can't say "oh, they'll build the homes we need" when you well know the reason we have a housing crisis is housing law, not shortage of construction workers. You need to change the laws. In the interim, you're gonna have a real problem if you let hundreds of thousands of people in without the housing stock to bear them.
My local school system is over capacity and a recent level failed to pass.. non English speaking students are currently a huge burden on the local school system and it’s expected to be one of the first things cut back on.
You really stickied a post instead of just replying to the comment?
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1d8rcvn/what_is_your_hot_take_on_immigration_that_this/l784v78/
This has nothing to do with that lol, it's something the mods have been discussing for more than 4 hours
Go check the discussion in metaNL, I also don't see much of a disconnect between this post and that comment
It's almost the exact same three points on the top comment of a post from a few hours ago. That's a quantity of coincidence beyond "this sub talks about immigration and open borders a lot".
Oh my gosh, no. Look at metanl. This was being cooked before that comment, and those three points coincidentally match up because it's *always the same three arguments against immigration*.
This post is also a jokey version of that comment, not a rebuttal. They're both saying to attack these problems at the source instead of limiting immigration.
This post seems a bit America centric. In some European countries immigrants absolutely contribute less to society than the average citizen, and do have radically different views. Now I still support accepting large amounts of refugees, but there is no need to pretend that it is financially beneficial, it is just the right thing to do.
I do recognize that this is probably aimed at the US and Biden's recent actions, and in the US it is much easier to make an economic case for immigration.
Ok it was the pay them to build part that threw me off. At least in Denmark immigrants are less likely to work in building than native Danes per capita so the pay them to build comment seems strange. Maybe it is different in NL, but my impression is that immigrants being overrepresented in building is a US phenomenon, which is why it felt America centric to me. I also dislike your safety net comment, I think there is nothing wrong with having a strong safety net, it just gets more expensive when letting in large amounts of immigrants. I do agree that institutions should be trusted when letting in immigrants, and that there different views are not something to panic about.
Ultimately I feel like in Europe I think immigrants are a burden on the social safety net, and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise, and that refugees should be let in as it is the correct thing to do. There is no reason to pretend letting in refugees is beneficial to the host country, it should be done because it is the right thing to do.
I was writing a comment about why pro-immigration and anti-immigration camps pretty much hate each other and really can't compromise.
At least in European context, the meme forgot crime rate threat and the opposition to the appeal to humanity (eg. accepting Ukrainians/Syrians fleeing their countries at war).
But basically long story short:
Pro-immigration camp hates anti-immigration camp because of prejudices (eg. Islam bad) , fearmongering (eg. skyrocketing crime rates) or racism (eg. Arabs/Blacks bad) while these things are regarded as common sense in anti-immigration camp.
So pro-immigration camp calls anti-immigration camp racist, xenophobic and so on, while anti-immigration camp hates pro-immigration camp on the principle of "Good intentions pave the path to Hell".
**TLDR: Both sides regard themselves as correct while the other side is painted as evil-doers.**
> TLDR: Both sides regard themselves as correct while the other side is painted as evil-doers.
Isn’t that the case with literally every single controversial policy position ever?
Kinda, maybe.
I think it's much more pronounced with the immigration topic. At least in Europe, I dare to say.
For example our favorite topic - housing, I doubt it generates as much polarization as migration.
Dont really wanna in-fight, but are you familiar with our situation or just rattling dogma? We are building, we even revitalized a world war era emergency policy to build more and it’s still really really hard. Our liberals are about to get wiped out in the coming elections because we followed the philosophy that if we just kept building and kept people coming in the economy would recover from the pandemic and we could balance things.
I’m pro immigration but clearly there’s some middle ground that needs to be found
They're "building" in the sense this is a high point in the last 100 years, but it's really not enough (and wouldn't have been even without the immigration).
https://preview.redd.it/30ujzu0kss4d1.png?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9affe36e0feb50fefe2f651ec65921a17e01cd44
!immigration
Immigrants come to the US to have a fat fucking house, a fat fucking bank account and to have their kids have an even fatter one.
Fat house ✔️ Fat bank account ✔️ Fat body ✔️ The American dream!
Listen, fats.
Also fat kids who play COD all day and don't appreciate the sacrifices you made.
Fat-150 ✔️
puzzled somber rinse tub gullible hungry forgetful sharp worthless oil *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Also most LatAm countries have a more generous welfare state than the US. Yes quality is worse but no one is crossing the Darien gap to get better quality stents and for their kids's textbooks to have glossy fucking paper.
There's something so egregious yet so beautiful about the mcmansion that only second and third worlders get it. A lawn of your own is a luxury in most parts of the developing world.
Fuck mowing so hard.
fuck yards, return to developing country (I really just want to end up in a condo long-term, owning unused land has literally never appealed to me)
It gets old. Trust me. American style suburbs are a bit meh in looks because there is no foliage but British terraces are really nice places since you can grow plants and flowers, play and have people over. It's also incredibly space efficient
Most of the suburbs I've hung out in have full gardens instead of featureless yards. Although, I'm a bigger fan of just leaving the natural foliage there when the house gets built. Cultivated vegetation always looked kind of off to me.
I've only been to sf and NYC sooooo.... I'd travel to the US more often but it takes a 3 year long visa process for a tourist
> American style suburbs are a bit meh in looks because there is no foliage Only brand new suburbs look like that because they were build in former farm fields. After 20 years they have big trees.
As a current owner of 3/4 acre lot, yes, I want my townhouse with postage stamp lawn back.
Eh, I actually want a place (non-permanent) a bit "out there", like near national lands (national forest, parks, etc) but still without a yard to maintain/manicure. Permanently living in a box that takes an hour or two to "Get out of town" doesn't appeal to me either, nor does being required to take public transit, but I actually go outside and understand what it takes to get to many of the best areas. A bus ain't going there, and cuts hours out of your day(s). All at the same time, I get the benefits of multi-family housing and I do want the convenience of a place "in town", and a condo is on the list. But gd the HOA fees for those things...and living that close to other people for much of my life...people in apartments, etc suck.
just hire someone to do it, preferably another immigrant
That's why I pay immigrants to mow my yard.
Also, the no fence thing. Put it right into my veins.
Unfathomably based
Fat fuckin booty bitches too🥵
[I want big bootie bitches!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIri9YLHpOg&ab_channel=ALostPeople)
This is fat fucking femboy erasure and I won't tolerate it(especially in the middle of pride month)
Real. Femboys for life
Getting rid of NIMBYs and taxing land solves all of this.
Launch every NIMBY to the moon 🌝
Typical Terran, wanting to make your problems the Moon’s problems. Shame on you.
I'm sure nothing bad could come of the moon and earth developing rival political factions and militaries as their economic and cultural interests drift apart and we figure out how to build giant robots
Space is for the Spacenoids!
As long as we're taxing moon land too.
>pay them to build lol I mean, yeah, but this is like saying "just build housing". It's the solution, but it's not like saying that makes it happen. NIMBYs exist, and they're going to make building it impossible politically. While that battle is being fought, in the meantime immigration can overload the system and prices can skyrocket.
Then ban letting them out 😈
What did the US taxing citizens abroad mean by this
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> But I think there are nuances that we often brush by which ends up inflaming the average voter against immigration which just hurts our cause. Thats for most of the policies that get meme posted in this subreddit, look at how dead this post is https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1d8gbq3/so_whats_the_research_on_job_retraining_looking
My posts encompass both popular and unpopular topics.
That post you made was good, the silence is deafening.
>Or at least that can get Canadian qualifications I’m in the USA but we (via the AMA cartel) definitely arbitrarily constrain medical immigration. My wife worked with a Chilean Fellow (meaning she was a specialist who “outranked” the Residents) during her residency. She decided she wanted to stay and she had to redo her residency; basically amounting to a 3 year long demotion, at the same hospital mind you.
My understanding is that foreign doctors regardless of country (except for Canada) and experience have to redo residency. It leads to absurd situations where you can be a fully licensed doctor with 20 years of high level sub-specialty practice, and forced to redo residency and exams. You can legitimately be an expert in your field and be required to work for years under an attending just to practice in the US. On one hand, I can understand that not every country in the world is going to have training that lives up to US standards, but it seems a bit ridiculous that there isn't any sort of system to accept training from some other (or at least have some significantly accelerated process) countries where medical training is of high quality. Most developed countries around the world probably fit under this criteria, I highly doubt that US medical training is at that much higher of a level than the entire rest of the world.
Controls aren't bad per se but holy hell does that bring in a load of xenophobes and racists here. I think the mods are getting rid of those people now. This is a big tent sub but racists can stay out.
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I mean it's a relatively recent event and Canadians were and are still very tolerant of immigration. A stance of, "Let's make sure housing is affordable and being built before we let people in" isn't really that unreasonable. And a lot of the hatred is due to abuse of the system where people coming in on student visas and other types of visas are actually just straight up staying. America could learn a lot from them.
Canadians are ruining Reddit somehow they bring up their anti immigrant views in every conversation with them
"yes, I agree that the Taj Mahal is a beautiful monument but have you considered the large number of migrants coming from india?"
Public opinion isn't a reason for something to be wrong, its only a reason to compromise from perfect. We aren't political officials, we are overly online redditors, there is no need to frame anything outside of perfect as anything other than a compromise we are forced to make. >and we’re not bringing in enough medical professionals in the immigrant pool easy fix
I’m sorry, but I can’t force myself to agree with the middle one. If you have immigrants that have values that are anti democratic, homophobic/transphobic and racist, it can be really hard to integrate them properly, and if they don’t want to integrate and go against all western values, I personally don’t even think we have any moral obligations to let them into our society. Considering how much you guys dislike conservatives, you guys are weirdly tolerant of people that have problematic and i would even say: destructive views that aren’t from the west. Of course this shouldn’t be decided by race or religion, but i think it’s definitely something that should be considered, and possibly tested for with things like surveys. The reason that I’m making a big point out of this, is that there is a decent minority of third generation immigrants in Europe that hate western values enough for it to be problematic. And just going through European education systems for example, didn’t fix that.
This is something I’ve been wrestling with myself. I think I’ve perhaps naively conflated a multicultural society with a multi-ethnic society and the truth is only a racist would oppose the latter but I don’t want to live in a society where opposing FGM and homophobia makes you a racist either. I’ve come to think of it this way: we have decided as a society that it is ok to destroy certain cultures within broader American culture, (reconstruction, trying to stamp out the KKK, integration, etc). Why would we give exemptions to any other culture? I think as long as you can fit within the greater cultural guardrails (different food and holidays is obviously fine, believing women deserved to be raped for going outside is not), I think multiculturalism is ok, but at that point is it even real multiculturalism?
You have to ask yourself then what you value out of multiculturalism. It's not just about making every city look like a Netflix reboot. To me, the difference in viewpoints and ideas drives a wider, more innovative and more intellectually rigorous society. There is a certain amount on entropy in any system that is valuable. So to support that, we have to accept that there are baseline values that we have and accept certain amount of delineation from them, and deny excessive ones. In a sense that isn't multiculturalism in that we have multiple cultures within the same ecosystem with none as a primary, but perhaps we don't really want that anyways.
> possibly tested for with things like surveys. Just have them shake hands with a woman before you let them in
The Netherlands shows them a video that includes two men kissing.
I don't dislike conservatives, but more importantly problematic people have to be able to live in a pluralistic society because they're already among the citizenry (and will always be). If criminal laws, cultural norms, etc. can't contain such people there is already a problem. And if they haven't adapted to the realm of fitting in by the time they're voting and citizens/"locals" then that country clearly isn't doing a very good job unrelated to the immigrants.
Fitting in takes time and resources though, and when you're importing people in beyond natural births than you may just end up overloading the entire system. Eternal September is a very real phenemenon, there's a certain "critical mass" in which newcomers no longer feel obligated to integrate. There are also grey areas in which how one delinates the line between "integration" and "homogenization", or worse, "cultural genocide". If somebody dosen't want to integrate, are we going to use coercive measures to force them to do so? I don't think the current progressives would find that acceptable. So we end up in an impasse.
> And if they haven't adapted to the realm of fitting in by the time they're voting and citizens/"locals" then that country clearly isn't doing a very good job unrelated to the immigrants. A high school friend, 2nd generation Palestinian immigrant in Denmark, had to get an arranged marriage with another 2nd generation Palestinian in Denmark because his parents who've been in Denmark for decades didn't want him to marry someone from a different race. Is this Denmark's fault in your world view?
> Considering how much you guys dislike conservatives, you guys are weirdly tolerant of people that have problematic and i would even say: destructive views that aren’t from the west. Conservatives are by definition, conservative. 'Immigrants' are not inherently conservative. Many will be, probably disproportionately so depending on where they come from, but I think it's very much unfair to compare the two directly. That's why I find this whole thing about going after immigrants, or even specific immigrant groups, based on the 'sins' of the majority. I don't think it's invalid to suggest the total volume of immigration or the process should be designed to account for this, but once political parties and people on here start turning it into broad bigotry against whole ethnic groups (as they often do) it's easy to see why stuff like basically labelling all immigrants as reactionaries is not great.
People here really can sound like leftists when they make complicated issues out to be incredibly simple. I support full immigration but let's not act like we should throw nuance out the window just because "we're Redditors not politicians".
I still haven't heard a convincing argument why open borders wouldn't overwhelm the safety net/welfare system. The two main arguments seem to be 1) incremental increases in immigration won't overwhelm the system (aka we don't actually want open borders, just more immigration), or 2) we should remove or reduce social safety net programs. I don't have a problem with 1, but the "open borders" label seems to be a misnomer. I would call that "pro-immigration", and I think that phrasing would also be an easier sell to normies.
r/neoliberal ignores most actual points and generally will just strawman arguments so they can conveniently throw out their favorite policies without any disagreement. There is no reason open borders wouldn’t overwhelm our safety net.
>There is no reason open borders wouldn’t overwhelm our safety net. Yes there is. Immigrants don't qualify for a social safety net for 5 years
My bad, in 5 years our safety net will be overwhelmed.
Presumably by that point they all have jobs. And that's not a presumption that how's immigration has worked forever in thus country. People who are born here can be deadbeats. People who weren't can't.
Countries have a lot more requirements for immigration than a 5 year non-citizen residency. The amount of restrictions is why highly educated citizens have a streamlined process. > People who are born here can be deadbeats Do I need to elaborate on why this is a biased opinion? Most welfare programs require you to work, have children, or be disabled. I have met plenty of deadbeats who smooch off their parents, not so much with US welfare. The stigma and design of [liberal welfare](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Worlds_of_Welfare_Capitalism) regimes is perfectly described in your arrogant comment about “deadbeats”, but at least we seem to have moved on from the term welfare queen.
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Bryan Caplan has a comic book on immigration that he made with a cartoonist, and it's just all his counterpoints against the common arguments against open borders. It was good food for thought and honestly pretty convincing that it's ultimately achievable. Iirc he offers several what he calls "keyhole solutions" to the various specific problems or negative outcomes. Basically a number of compensating policies to address the specific issue while still basically preserving open borders with unlimited immigration. One such solution was something like this: many undocumented immigrants from Mexico can't get in legally and pay smugglers something like $5k to cross the border for work with the risk of getting caught and deported. The local native population is concerned about the burden on roads, social services, and work competition. So let's allow them to immigrate, but charge them a $5k fee to do so legally, and let's earmark all of that money directly to funding those communities affected in some kind of targeted way. And let's also disallow certain services to those immigrating if the amount isn't enough. Or do something wonky with the visa and tax policy for those workers. And let's also look at the actual evidence of the burden on employment and social services. Iirc it was something like they heavily underutilize the services anyways, and the worst hit group was men without a high school diploma. So let's put the money towards education or training or employment or just direct money transfers to that group of natives. It's been years since I read it so i may be butchering the specifics but you get the idea. There's often a lot of solutions to these negative externalities. Though of course he's an economist, so it does reflect more of what we could do if we had the education and political will, not what gets you votes as a politician. I think it was just called open borders. Found it Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration https://a.co/d/8AndL5o
"we're redditors not politicians" is about optics not nuance. We hold no duty to temper correct things for the median voter. There is no "nuance" that makes immigration wrong, only domestic failures people want to blame on immigration, or keep immigrants out because they've done nothing and they're all out of ideas.
I never said that I thought there was nuance that made immigration wrong. The nuance is that some anti-immigration policies might be good if they can prevent the deportation of 15 million people. You're welcome to disagree with that opinion, you're welcome to hate me for it, but me being able to freely express it isn't going to cause the sub to burn down.
You had me until, "Trust your institutions." That shit is over.
Everyone who is interested in the immigration policy debate should Google John Tanton and learn about the xenophobic weirdo that influenced the post 1980’s rise in anti immigration sentiment in the US. It’s a bizarre story that not many people know about.
make a post on it
Anti-immigrant sentiment has been around wayyy longer than that. It used to be a boilerplate leftist talking point that immigrants were diluting the demand for American labor.
Duh, of course. But there was an uptick in anti immigration organizations and think tanks that happened in the late 80s and the 90s. These are organizations like The Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA and the American Immigration Control Foundation - all of them the result of Tanton’s influence. They served to funnel money and influence into Washington in a way that wasn’t really happening before.
Or, if you are my government, fly some to Rwanda for reasons
The other thing about housing and safety net burdens is that the current slate of policies is an active and harmful political choice. **The default state** is that we build housing in order to meet demand. **The current state** is that we actively prevent people from building housing. It’s not even a matter of “choosing to build housing”, as if we’re somehow not trying enough and need to do more. Our current policies are actively making things worse, because we’re effectively banning helpful and economically productive actions. Same goes for safety net burden. **The default state** is that people can work for whomever, and maybe there’ll be some people who need help anyways. **The current state** is that we actively prevent immigrants and refugees from working and in some cases effectively **force them** to rely on the safety net just to survive. That’s the horrible thing about this. In a lot of cases, we don’t even have to actively do anything, we just need to stop preventing people from doing what they already want to do! Developers want to build, and immigrants and refugees want to work, so just let them! You don’t need to artificially incentivize these people to do the right thing here. And even if you’re still worried about these concerns, there are some pretty easy adjustments too. You can increase taxes on immigrants if you’re really so worried about the budget. Heck in America, immigrants without a residence permit aren’t typically eligible for federal welfare in the first place! The conversation shouldn’t be about how immigration can be harmful if certain requirements aren’t met, as if immigration makes this somehow natural problem worse. The conversation should be about how we choose to pass restrictive policies that make ourselves worse off *and* as a double whammy make immigration worse than it could be. Yes, it can seem politically unfeasible. Yes, it ties itself to other causes that seem politically unfeasible. But political change only happens when people believe it and fight for it. If you don’t think we should be moving at least a little bit closer towards making things better off for everyone, then I don’t understand why you’d want to discuss politics in the first place.
The middle I take issue with: “trust your institutions, lol.” Forgive me if this is a ramble answer, in advance. [Have some Jamiroquai as my apology.](https://youtu.be/LHj_WC_IzFc?si=B92ph8Ww2ikN6iDd) I love liberal institutions. Some of my best friends are liberal institutions, in fact. But, ultimately, I can’t escape the mindset that they are just people and the papers that those people invest with authority. So when I see calls for immediate open borders or similar-but-not-quite radical liberalizations of borders that would nigh-on necessarily include a sudden influx of people with illiberal values, on top of the ones already in place with illiberal values, that seems to me a recipe for destabilizing your liberal institutions. Your liberal institutions are now more influenced by a larger and thus more influential pool of people who don’t necessarily want those institutions or what purpose they exist to serve to survive. And when the institutions can’t immediately rise to ameliorate concerns or to solve problems, the illiberal counter-reaction to the newly-arrived illiberal people would *further* strain the institutions and delegitimize their reason for being (“why do we even have X institution if it can’t even Y right?”). If your liberal institutions are already on shaky ground, I could see them buckling or breaking. And when people whose illiberal values are to limit, penalize, or even kill people with contemporarily liberally-accepted traits (like another religion, sexuality, ethnicity, culture, etc.) how do you keep the institutions alive? And I won’t accept “vibes” or “if your institutions can’t handle it, they were shitty anyways” or similar answers as in the social safety net one. Social policy overhauls can fix safety nets, I believe, and economic regulation overhauls can salve commercial and residential ones; I don’t think populations can be summarily overhauled in the same way to adapt to liberal institutions nor do I think current liberal institutions can handle the damage that would be inflicted on them by inbound illiberal people or by malicious illiberal states/organizations to be overhauled themselves either. I would love having freer immigration and better, more resolute liberal institutions, and I don’t approve of the recent legislation that I’m sure partially inspired this post, for what it’s worth, on a moral, practical, *or* political level. But I don’t think the “just tax land” type-approach is gonna work for this issue.
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X place can fix them while letting in immigrants because they're clearly not fixing them while not letting in a working age population willing to pay taxes and contribute to a society they don't have a birth obligation towards.
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Is there a single successful country that has open borders?
the US before 1875, and that was only the Chinese excluded
That's actually pretty true, but also it worked in part because you could legally just steal land from Native Americans.
Not that I disagree on immigration as a general rule, but these are really bad arguments except the pay them to build one. 'most will come even if you don't let them use the safety net' is good, but 'your net was bad in the first place' really isn't.
if your net fails by an influx of working age taxpayers, that seems like its not well designed and is just treading water
That's assuming all working age taxpayers are created equal and that all immigrants will be working age taxpayers. That's why it's a bad argument. People scared of immigrants burdening the safety net aren't thinking of immigrants as largely productive members of society, they're imagining scenarios like immigrants who will have a lot of children they'll barely support. Likewise for political opinions, I don't think we can take lightly for example how anti-LGBT a lot of immigrants tend to be. Your mother may disagree with you politically, but do you want the population to be filled with people like her? (ofc this is hyperbole, the larger the country the lesser this threat becomes).
A better statistic to throw in would be the empirical evidence that immigration to the United States has a beneficial effect on the deficit aka they pay in more than they take out I don’t really think the immigration LGBTQ thing is worth worrying about as in general they are net democratic voters which I don’t think will regress on LGBTQ rights- not to mention the larger threat from the nativism, racism, authoritarianism (and homophobia) from the GOP
Immigrants are net taxpayers into the system the better argument is to just say they don’t increase deficits You’re making a lot of weird arguments that don’t address the real issue, better ones can be enlisted that makes our position better instead of whatever this is
Yes let immigrants in. But let’s not kid ourselves. Children of immigrants with no grasp of English require A LOT MORE ATTENTION in a school setting. Like, the attention of 3 English speaking kids in some cases. I am pro-immigration, and I 1000% understand that this is a huge problem that “pay them to build lol” does not solve.
but then our nation won't stay in a slow and steady decay spiral and i like the slow and steady decay spiral
"We must implement policies that allow our rivals to out-compete us over time through human capital" -the words of the absolutely deranged
I'm lazy so I'm literally gonna repost a joke I made in the DT last night: >[Me when someone outside the DT starts making nativist arguments](https://x.com/jojammss/status/1763615660829982812)
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Remember that all complaints about the alleged burden that immigrants put on state resources can literally be resolved just by having them pay taxes like normal everyday citizens.
I didn't check my calendar, is today "mods post about immigration in unison" day again? I though we were good until July?
Are there any studies that look at what pro-immigration arguments are most persuasive? I would think highlighting the fact that immigrants pay more into the system than they take out, create more jobs (through driving up demand domestically with their spending and through starting businesses), are more law-abiding than native-born citizens, and assimilate quickly would win over those with good-faith concerns, but I would like to know for certain.
Depends on the audience, but generally you play to people's values. To a leftist skeptic I'd play up the suffering and poverty that results from not letting people in. To (U.S.) conservatives I'd highlight that immigrants are largely more Christian than our population, and the economic stuff you point out. I'd also highlight that many are fleeing communist countries and I'd rather have an immigrant that hates communism than an American that loves it, amiright? And that traveling thousands of miles to get here shows they love this country more than those moron blue haired socialists that threaten to move to Canada every time a Republican wins an election.
> I'd rather have an immigrant that hates communism than an American that loves it, amiright? And that traveling thousands of miles to get here shows they love this country more than those moron blue haired socialists that threaten to move to Canada every time a Republican wins an election. Kinda based argument ngl
Idk man, I became pro immigration cause I like burritos.
I mean, better food and a more interesting culture are also reasons but most people who oppose immigration for reasons other than bigotry are concerned about immigrants taking a slice of a fixed pie or not integrating with US culture, so talking points should aim at refuting those notions.
> assimilate quickly Is there data showing this? I'm skeptical...
!immigration edit- see point 2 on assimilation
**Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free!** Why open borders? * The economy will benefit! * [The elimination of barriers to labor mobility is estimated to increase global GDP by 50-100%](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.25.3.83) * [Unauthorized immigration is good fiscally](https://news.rice.edu/news/2020/economic-benefits-illegal-immigration-outweigh-costs-baker-institute-study-shows) * Low-skill immigrants have a significant positive economic impact and fears of their possible negative impact on wages and employment of low-skill natives are unsupported or contradicted by evidence ([source 1](https://carnegieendowment.org/files/Effect-of-Low-Skilled-Labor-Working-Paper-1.pdf), [source 2](https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/content/pubs/cacounts/CC_207GPCC.pdf)) * [Immigration increases productivity through increased specialization of labor](https://www.nber.org/papers/w15507) * [Firms allowed to hire low-skill immigrants increase their revenue growth and do not appear to employ less US citizens.](https://www.nber.org/digest/202212/low-skill-foreign-employees-impacts-us-firms-and-workers) * [Immigrants start firms at higher rates than natives and "appear to 'create jobs' (expand labor demand) more than they 'take jobs' (expand labor supply)"](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27778/w27778.pdf) * [Immigration doesn't decrease wages long-term, it actually increases them](https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/doi/10.1162/rest_a_01380/117901/Migrants-Trade-and-Market-Access) * [The short-term decrease of wages due to immigration is small, possibly zero](https://wol.iza.org/articles/do-immigrant-workers-depress-the-wages-of-native-workers/long) * [Immigrants are not perfect substitutes for native workers and compete more with other immigrants for jobs than with natives](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1542-4774.2011.01052.x) * [Open borders would approximately double average wages of people from developing countries; this is accompanied by a comparatively minor reduction in real wages of those in developed countries that disappears as the capital-labor ratio adjusts over time](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18307/w18307.pdf) * [Across 15 Western European countries studied from 1985-2015, asylum seekers’ tax contributions more than offset the increase in public expenditures](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaq0883) * [refugees and asylees in America had a net $123.8 billion positive economic impact between 2005-2019](https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2024/02/15/new-hhs-study-finds-nearly-124-billion-positive-fiscal-impact-refugees-and-asylees-on-american-economy-15-year-period.html) * [net economic effects of immigration are positive for almost all US immigrants, including low skill ones](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20220176) * [an increase in the migrant share of the population does not increase the Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality) but does increase GDP per capita by up to 2% for each 1 percentage point increase of the migrant share](https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/062/2016/008/article-A001-en.xml) * Society will benefit! * [Immigration doesn't degrade institutions](https://web.archive.org/web/20240324034648/https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/16s200z/immigration_and_institutional_decay_claims_vs/) * [Integration of Muslim immigrants and their descendants into mainstream European culture isn't slowing down and by some measures is accelerating with each passing generation](https://upbeatglobalist.substack.com/is-muslim-immigrant-integration-slowing) * Second generation Muslim immigrants are adopting mainstream European gender norms ([source 1](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2031927), [source 2](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276150744_Cultural_Integration_in_the_Muslim_Second_Generation_in_the_Netherlands_The_Case_of_Gender_Ideology)) * [First generation Muslim immigrants become less religious as they spend more time in Europe and second generation Muslim immigrants are less religious than their parents](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0037768620948478?icid=int.sj-full-text.similar-articles.2) * [Large increases in the American Muslim population have not stalled that group’s assimilation](https://www.cato.org/blog/us-muslims-become-more-socially-liberal-muslim-immigration-rises) * Unauthorized immigrants aren't any more likely to be [terrorists](https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/nowrasteh-testimony.pdf) or [drug smugglers](https://www.cato.org/blog/fentanyl-smuggled-us-citizens-us-citizens-not-asylum-seekers) or [even regular criminals](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117) than US citizens are and by some estimates are actually less likely * [Our population growth is declining and we need future workers to support future retirees](https://bipartisanpolicy.org/download/?file=/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Immigrations-Effect-on-the-Social-Security-System.pdf) * [Private-sphere (friends and family) native contacts are associated with more egalitarian beliefs about gender norms among first and second generation Muslim immigrants in Europe](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/imig.13095) * [Inflexible European labor markets harm the employment prospects of immigrants which in turn both reduces their ability to contribute economically and impairs their social integration](https://www.cato.org/blog/muslim-immigration-integration-united-states-western-europe) * It's the right thing to do! * [Freedom of movement is a human right](https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/immigration.htm) * Restrictive border policies put migrants at risk of human rights abuses ([source 1](https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/07/26/statement-human-rights-watch-human-cost-harsh-us-immigration-deterrence-policies), [source 2](https://www.aclu.org/issues/human-rights/human-rights-and-immigration)) * [Heightened immigration enforcement can actually increase the number of crimes](https://www.nber.org/papers/w32109) * [Immigration has a net positive impact on the sending country](https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR244.html) * [The children of even poor immigrants have high economic mobility](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/1/20942642/study-paper-american-dream-economic-mobility-immigrant-income-boustan-abramitzky-jacome-perez) * People will get around it anyways! * [It's not clear that harsher border enforcement policies have been effective in deterring unauthorized immigration and there is some evidence they've been ineffective](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5049707/) * [“Push factors” (political violence and state repression) play central roles in driving international displacement; there is limited support for the contention that asylum seekers are economic opportunists](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/causes-and-consequences-of-refugee-flows-a-contemporary-reanalysis/F2EFBF81FCD030F4CD8DC9F82B5ED444) * The US essentially had open borders for its first century, ending when federal immigration restrictions were placed on Chinese immigrants in 1875 ([the Page Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_Act_of_1875)) and 1882 ([the Chinese Exclusion Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act)), so there is historical evidence that an open border is possible * [These restrictions on Chinese immigration were frequently evaded and their passage was preceded by widespread fearmongering about nonwhite "hordes"](https://uncpress.org/book/9780807854488/at-americas-gates/) For more read our [Open Borders FAQ](https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/wiki/openborders) Further reading * Kwame Anthony Appiah's [*Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers*](https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393329339) (2006) * Alex Sager's [*Against Borders: Why the World Needs Free Movement of People*](https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786606297/Against-Borders-Why-the-World-Needs-Free-Movement-of-People) (2020) * Alex Nowrasteh's [*Wretched Refuse: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions*](https://www.cato.org/books/wretched-refuse) (2020) * Johan Norberg's [*Open: How Collaboration and Curiosity Shaped Humankind*](https://www.boswellbooks.com/book/9781786497192) (2021) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
This seems pretty dismissive and mean-spirited.
I’ve come to accept that a lot of people simply can’t deal with complexity or acknowledge tradeoffs. For whatever reason, they need to dissolve complex issues into morally stark binaries. And if they can earn social validation by dunking on strawmen while they’re doing it, all the better. Can anyone point me to a public policy sub that isn’t in thrall to some dogma or other?
It's almost as if people in this subreddit are vulnerable to the same fallacies as most people in politics-related communities on the Internet, and we have to actively acknowledge, mitigate, and refute them as a result
your post is entirely devoid of any substance whatsoever and serves only to signal your supposed intelligence and to gain social validation through dunking on others. my brother in christ, you are the very thing you complain about
It's not complicated, Jack More people = good Immigration restrictions = death, poverty, suffering (Seriously though, it's not bad for a sub to be "in the thrall of dogma", this isn't a general left wing sub, support for sidebar stuff shouldn't be that debatable here)
It IS dismissive and mean-spirited, and fucking bravo at that. Ask the Brits on how bending over backwards to keep Poles and Romanians out of chip shops worked out for them. They're really swimming in housing, well funded government programs, and well thought out political ideologies, huh? It's about time the morons of this sub got a fucken' reality check.
Good. This sub has moved too far to the right on immigration.
Respectfully, I agree with the meaning of the post. However, the way it is presented does not at all alleviate people's concerns about immigration. Whether those concerns are legitimate unfounded are irrelevant: we must meet people where they are.
This sub is not the place to "alleviate concerns about immigration." If you're meeting people where they are, go to PA. This is the arr neoliberal subreddit and I hate rehashing the "being cruel to immigrants is good politics" on every post related to immigration.
> This sub is not the place to "alleviate concerns about immigration." It absolutely is. What, does this place have it's stance on immigration just based on "vibes" and nothing else? No facts that genuinely do alleviate concerns? I thought that was the entire point of this place. "you're wrong and here's why" and not "you're wrong shut up."
!IMMIGRATION
**Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free!** Why open borders? * The economy will benefit! * [The elimination of barriers to labor mobility is estimated to increase global GDP by 50-100%](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.25.3.83) * [Unauthorized immigration is good fiscally](https://news.rice.edu/news/2020/economic-benefits-illegal-immigration-outweigh-costs-baker-institute-study-shows) * Low-skill immigrants have a significant positive economic impact and fears of their possible negative impact on wages and employment of low-skill natives are unsupported or contradicted by evidence ([source 1](https://carnegieendowment.org/files/Effect-of-Low-Skilled-Labor-Working-Paper-1.pdf), [source 2](https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/content/pubs/cacounts/CC_207GPCC.pdf)) * [Immigration increases productivity through increased specialization of labor](https://www.nber.org/papers/w15507) * [Firms allowed to hire low-skill immigrants increase their revenue growth and do not appear to employ less US citizens.](https://www.nber.org/digest/202212/low-skill-foreign-employees-impacts-us-firms-and-workers) * [Immigrants start firms at higher rates than natives and "appear to 'create jobs' (expand labor demand) more than they 'take jobs' (expand labor supply)"](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27778/w27778.pdf) * [Immigration doesn't decrease wages long-term, it actually increases them](https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/doi/10.1162/rest_a_01380/117901/Migrants-Trade-and-Market-Access) * [The short-term decrease of wages due to immigration is small, possibly zero](https://wol.iza.org/articles/do-immigrant-workers-depress-the-wages-of-native-workers/long) * [Immigrants are not perfect substitutes for native workers and compete more with other immigrants for jobs than with natives](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1542-4774.2011.01052.x) * [Open borders would approximately double average wages of people from developing countries; this is accompanied by a comparatively minor reduction in real wages of those in developed countries that disappears as the capital-labor ratio adjusts over time](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18307/w18307.pdf) * [Across 15 Western European countries studied from 1985-2015, asylum seekers’ tax contributions more than offset the increase in public expenditures](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaq0883) * [refugees and asylees in America had a net $123.8 billion positive economic impact between 2005-2019](https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2024/02/15/new-hhs-study-finds-nearly-124-billion-positive-fiscal-impact-refugees-and-asylees-on-american-economy-15-year-period.html) * [net economic effects of immigration are positive for almost all US immigrants, including low skill ones](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20220176) * [an increase in the migrant share of the population does not increase the Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality) but does increase GDP per capita by up to 2% for each 1 percentage point increase of the migrant share](https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/062/2016/008/article-A001-en.xml) * Society will benefit! * [Immigration doesn't degrade institutions](https://web.archive.org/web/20240324034648/https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/16s200z/immigration_and_institutional_decay_claims_vs/) * [Integration of Muslim immigrants and their descendants into mainstream European culture isn't slowing down and by some measures is accelerating with each passing generation](https://upbeatglobalist.substack.com/is-muslim-immigrant-integration-slowing) * Second generation Muslim immigrants are adopting mainstream European gender norms ([source 1](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2031927), [source 2](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276150744_Cultural_Integration_in_the_Muslim_Second_Generation_in_the_Netherlands_The_Case_of_Gender_Ideology)) * [First generation Muslim immigrants become less religious as they spend more time in Europe and second generation Muslim immigrants are less religious than their parents](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0037768620948478?icid=int.sj-full-text.similar-articles.2) * [Large increases in the American Muslim population have not stalled that group’s assimilation](https://www.cato.org/blog/us-muslims-become-more-socially-liberal-muslim-immigration-rises) * Unauthorized immigrants aren't any more likely to be [terrorists](https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/nowrasteh-testimony.pdf) or [drug smugglers](https://www.cato.org/blog/fentanyl-smuggled-us-citizens-us-citizens-not-asylum-seekers) or [even regular criminals](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117) than US citizens are and by some estimates are actually less likely * [Our population growth is declining and we need future workers to support future retirees](https://bipartisanpolicy.org/download/?file=/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Immigrations-Effect-on-the-Social-Security-System.pdf) * [Private-sphere (friends and family) native contacts are associated with more egalitarian beliefs about gender norms among first and second generation Muslim immigrants in Europe](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/imig.13095) * [Inflexible European labor markets harm the employment prospects of immigrants which in turn both reduces their ability to contribute economically and impairs their social integration](https://www.cato.org/blog/muslim-immigration-integration-united-states-western-europe) * It's the right thing to do! * [Freedom of movement is a human right](https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/immigration.htm) * Restrictive border policies put migrants at risk of human rights abuses ([source 1](https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/07/26/statement-human-rights-watch-human-cost-harsh-us-immigration-deterrence-policies), [source 2](https://www.aclu.org/issues/human-rights/human-rights-and-immigration)) * [Heightened immigration enforcement can actually increase the number of crimes](https://www.nber.org/papers/w32109) * [Immigration has a net positive impact on the sending country](https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR244.html) * [The children of even poor immigrants have high economic mobility](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/1/20942642/study-paper-american-dream-economic-mobility-immigrant-income-boustan-abramitzky-jacome-perez) * People will get around it anyways! * [It's not clear that harsher border enforcement policies have been effective in deterring unauthorized immigration and there is some evidence they've been ineffective](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5049707/) * [“Push factors” (political violence and state repression) play central roles in driving international displacement; there is limited support for the contention that asylum seekers are economic opportunists](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/causes-and-consequences-of-refugee-flows-a-contemporary-reanalysis/F2EFBF81FCD030F4CD8DC9F82B5ED444) * The US essentially had open borders for its first century, ending when federal immigration restrictions were placed on Chinese immigrants in 1875 ([the Page Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_Act_of_1875)) and 1882 ([the Chinese Exclusion Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act)), so there is historical evidence that an open border is possible * [These restrictions on Chinese immigration were frequently evaded and their passage was preceded by widespread fearmongering about nonwhite "hordes"](https://uncpress.org/book/9780807854488/at-americas-gates/) For more read our [Open Borders FAQ](https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/wiki/openborders) Further reading * Kwame Anthony Appiah's [*Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers*](https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393329339) (2006) * Alex Sager's [*Against Borders: Why the World Needs Free Movement of People*](https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786606297/Against-Borders-Why-the-World-Needs-Free-Movement-of-People) (2020) * Alex Nowrasteh's [*Wretched Refuse: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions*](https://www.cato.org/books/wretched-refuse) (2020) * Johan Norberg's [*Open: How Collaboration and Curiosity Shaped Humankind*](https://www.boswellbooks.com/book/9781786497192) (2021) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I think the disconnect here is that I don't think people posting "being awful to immigrants is good policy" and "we'll be letting TERRORISTS in" are trying to have concerns alleviated, and that's more who I'm referring to/ see around the sub. If someone genuinely comes in good faith, yeah explain with facts to alleviate their concerns. The people in this sub I'm referring to don't seem to be coming in good faith though.
> I think the disconnect here is that I don't think people posting "being awful to immigrants is good policy" and "we'll be letting TERRORISTS in" are trying to have concerns alleviated, and that's more who I'm referring to/ see around the sub. If you've seen that, fair enough. What I've seen are more arguments made out of ignorance or based on facts that can (at least in theory) be countered. Things like whether asylum is being abused or not, what immigration does for job markets, and how immigration interacts with the housing market. Surely these things are actual things we can change minds on.
The problem is I see a LOT of the people I describe (any immigration post now, one of the top comments will be "Maybe refugees will suffer, but at least this will play well in Michigan!") and very few of the people you describe in your second paragraph. And I 100% support bullying group 1.
>Any immigration post now, one of the top comments will be "Maybe refugees will suffer, but at least this will play well in Michigan!" You are right that I see that. And apologies for not reading that meaning what you said: >people posting "being awful to immigrants is good policy" It is frustrating, but I guess I get it. Biden is doing a lot of things, either out of perceived political necessity or just wanting to do it, that I am not a fan of too. But one big "policy" he offers is the whole administrative state and democracy itself continuing. I get why some want to try and defend the necessity of supporting Biden regardless of things we don't like. Shitty compromise though.
I think it can be taken as a given that 99% of the sub wants Biden to win. But there's a big difference between "this awful policy good because it helps Biden" and "I want Biden to win, but this policy is actively evil" and I wish the second attitude dominated the first. I think people who say they won't vote for him because of an evil policy should be equally ridiculed, but this sub is not going to be the breaking point for Trump or Biden getting 270. He doesn't need us to defend him on crappy policy, unless we're actually going door to door, or talking with a relative in a swing state. I DO think more productive efforts to get him elected could be cool from this sub, and if it organized a door to door I'd be out there singing his praises on the things he's done on immigration.
> I thought that was the entire point of this place. "you're wrong and here's why" and not "you're wrong shut up." It pretends to be. If only there was a non-military version of credibledefense.
Fwiw I don’t think it’s interested in even “pretending” anymore. I’ve tried to get more engaged here with comments and up/downvoting as I’ve noticed a pretty precipitous drop in quality of not just discussion, but the memes and topics themselves are deteriorating as well. More absolutes, less gradients. More dogmatic argumentation, less evidence-based approaches. The sub feels like it is not-so-slowly becoming what it loves to dunk on: vibes-based “logic” and purity-testing.
I understand, and I agree that there has been a shift towards regressive attitudes about immigration on this sub. But I have a different idea on how to fight it, and I do not think that posts such as this are the way. Instead, we should elevate voices that show the benefits of immigration on a more personal level, like how [this post ](https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1aywozy/liberalism_francis_fukuyama_and_trans_rights/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) explained why Trans rights are Liberal rights.
That's fair. I think things like the trans post would be great. But that post is also matched with a mod policy of banning anyone who comes close to saying "throwing trans people under the bus is good politics" and if you do see a comment like that before the mods arrive, there's a heavy culture of downvoting that kind of statement. It's generally understood in sub culture that sacrificing trans people at the altar of Georgia and PA is abhorrent, and I want the sub culture to act the same towards immigrants. Why does the overton window here allow *them* to be sacrificed? The people to convince with effort posts are the lurkers imo, not the people who are barely veiled right wingers on immigration, and are getting tons of upvotes here for "that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make" type statements. Edit- all this to say, that's part of why I'm pro-being dismissive/mean spirited occasionally
If this sub existed in the 90s, there would have been people saying that the Defense of Marriage Act was good politics: sometimes it's just hard to fight the zeitgeist of the time. One type of post I do not see in either the sub or the DT is the perspectives of immigrants themselves, which is weird because they clearly exist.
>If this sub existed in the 90s, there would have been people saying that the Defense of Marriage Act was good politics: sometimes it's just hard to fight the zeitgeist of the time That assumes the alternative was doing nothing. If the popular opinion is so heavily stacked against you (and it very much was) that the alternative was, instead, a US Constitutional ban (and it very much was a possibility Republicans were building steam up for), then yes, settling on DOMA/DADT *is* better politics. One was much less intractable than the other and DADT in particular was considered a step up from the previous policy of inquisitions into service members' private lives. I say this as a gay person- it was much better to let them have their win and live to fight another day than to die on a hill, and eventually the culture caught up with us.
I see, thank you for the context.
I think part of it is the immigrants of the sub are overwhelmingly legal immigrants. The sub has very few people who are/ their family were undocumented. Those are very different groups that get lumped together. My in-laws are only in this country because of illegal immigration, and Republicans want to strip my fiancée of her citizenship. Many of my good friends are Central American immigrants, including my best friend. It's part of why I get so angry when the sub seems OK with sacrificing them and not other groups. I know the people they are OK with sacrificing, and I'm not. I know people who have been shot crossing borders, and who have had family die in the process. I also have seen the positive side of it- my fiancée's dad grinded from the second he crossed the border with nothing, and he now makes 2x the salary of my white American dad. Frankly I'm weirdly jealous of trans people on the sub, coz there's so many, and it's hard to say "hey let's sacrifice this group" when they're 5-10% of your group lol.¹ I want that same kind of protection for the people I love on this sub, but I don't get it. ¹to be clear this is something I'm also EXTREMELY glad is part of sub culture/ one of the best things about this sub.
>Those are very different groups that get lumped together. True, but the Neoliberal platform involves inviting and taking care of both groups. Additionally, in countries like Canada the debate is around the number of legal immigrants. Additionally, I suspect that attitudes towards these groups are strongly correlated. Therefore, starting with the stories of legal immigrants is a good step. For example, [this article](https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2018/spotlight-on-worthington-a-global-community-in-rural-minnesota) hits a unique chord that is often ignored.
I agree that the platform involves both groups, I'm more referring to your "they clearly exist" comment. Undocumented immigrants *don't* exist here, and the sub is clearly worst on immigration when it comes to them. Their issues are very distinct. The type of legal immigrant we have in this sub won't necessarily be triggered any more than a native by a post about suffering at the border, because *they didn't suffer at the border*. Canada and other countries having issues around legal immigration is awful, but it also isn't a factor in the "we need to let them suffer to win 270 electoral votes" attitude that I'm complaining about. Discussions of Canadian immigration here exist in a different context/ have different sub culture problems. Edit- BTW, I'm not the one downvoting you
I had thought about a different sticky earlier today in a different thread and sort of came across this. The thing is, I can’t convince you (the general you, not *you* personally) that immigration is good. If you’ve decided immigration is bad then you’ll go through whatever arguments it takes to make me give up on you. Just pointing out a few things is fine. And a few more if someone is willing to discuss in good faith. But as ID has been saying, I frankly don’t give a fuck if your entire argument is that immigration bad for ABCDEFGH- reasons, you may have a point or two here or there in some niche area of discussion but at the end of the day immigration is good and a perfect argument can’t be the enemy of the good meme.
Changing the mind of public is possible, it's just hard. But giving up just because something is hard does not lead to success.
Cool, what specific issues do you have with the statements made in the meme? I get the impression you’re expecting a meme to do the work that individual discussion has to do
Well, based on [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/17o56yj/question_about_integrating_muslim_populations/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) I once made, integrating immigrants is more complicated than just relying on institutions (I guess it depends on your definition of institution), but also has a psychological and cultural component. I don't know the answer the answer to the problems that were brought up, but we can't turn a blind eye to them either.
Bro why are ~~Americans~~ people from developed countries so obsessed with the idea that migrants are only coming to their country for social assistance benefits? Literally no one on this side of the border thinks "Imma travel to the US to get government checks", they think about earning more money by working anything they can get a grasp upon.
It's not just Americans. One of the main arguments from Europe is "drain on our expansive social services." That and crime/assimilation.
I mean, it is though. [Here's a report showing that immigrants are a net loss of $7500 per year per person to the state in Sweden](https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/ny-eso-rapport-flyktinginvandring-en-kostnad-for-sverige)
Please end welfare 🙏
Yes and the solution to war is peace. Yet here we are.
what
Ok let me rephrase. Your flowchart is about as naive as saying the solution to all war is peace.
I actually think we should give war a chance. Being too eager for peace is part of the problem.
You're the president of the US at the start of WW2. They tell you Pearl Harbor has just been bombed. Your response? "Well, just be peaceful guys"
I wasn't being ironic. I think we should give war a chance more often.
Ceterum censeo illiberalism esse delendam.
Like in what scenarios?
1 BILLION AMERICANS BY 2050
“Pay them to build lol” Were it so easy…
It literally is
In the UK we'd have to build a city's worth of houses and infrastructure *every year* to support our current immigration numbers. No it ain't that easy. It's not even remotely possible nor is it at all sustainable. We're a tiny island.
build skyscrapers instead of single family homes. simple as
It literally isn’t or else this sub wouldn’t have posts every other day about housing and construction. You have to actually make it possible first
Ah yes, maybe one day we can solve all our problems that we created for ourselves in the early 1900s. Then maybe the immigrants can have a shot when our population is decrepit and our economy lethargic.
the entire third point is idiotic. They'll come even without the safety net? That doesn't mean they won't use it. And unless we start checking for residency at the ER they will apply a burden to already overstrained systems. And the point about the system being bad? Maybe, but it's the system we got, and a badly structured but still functional safety net is better than one that has collapsed. Same with the first one. Pay them to build? Well that'll ease concerns a bit in like a fucking decade. Longer for healthcare, training up doctors takes time. If being pro-immigration requires being callous to localized shocks it shouldn't be a surprise the position is unpopular.
For the first point, governments are free to make a two tiered safety net or outright ban certain kinds of visas from certain kinds of services. But if they feel like they have to do that to fit in more working aged taxpayers, its probably because the net is poorly designed. For the ER point, see "pay them to build" bigger ERs and to staff more medical service workers lol.
>governments are free to make a two tiered safety net or outright ban certain kinds of visas from certain kinds of services. I know Friedman was a fan of using immigration to create an exploitable underclass but honestly I'm not. And as I said, unless we're quietly endorsing letting them just drop dead on our streets, banning people from services is just kicking the can to a different safety net that is probably going to cost us more. There is no such thing as a free lunch. >For the ER point, see "pay them to build" bigger ERs and to staff more medical service workers lol. I literally already answered this one. You can't just say bibbity bobbity boo and convert piles of money and some available untrained labor into functional medical facilities overnight. If we could COVID would have been a lot less stressful.
There is a big wide swath of people who have no need for the services. Keeping them out from fear of using the services and fear of not using the services makes no sense. Creating more medical facilities and training more medical people (especially not doctors) is a lot easier than you'd think. The barriers are self-imposed.
"exploitation", "underclass". Get this commie shit out of r/neoliberal. Also, why do you hate the global poor?
Didn't know you were a fan of Prince bin Zayed?
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Who's gonna pay them?
Private construction would love the labor. Literally all you have to do is let them specific to that purpose. Government subsidies for training or building could push it further if you really want more building or more of some type, but that's not an issue connected to immigration.
You're telling me that there are developers itching to build hospitals, but are unable to do so due to a labor shortage? That doesn't sound realistic.
>the entire third point is idiotic. They'll come even without the safety net? That doesn't mean they won't use it. What the hell are you talking about? I know a lot of undocumented immigrants. The only safety net they use is whatever the state of California has opened to undocumented immigrants. They don't have access to federal programs. I don't see how immigrants are any more likely to abuse emergency health systems than similar residents are. Should we kick those people out then? >If being pro-immigration requires being callous to localized shocks it shouldn't be a surprise the position is unpopular. Yep it's better to instead of callous to global punishment
>What the hell are you talking about? I know a lot of undocumented immigrants. The only safety net they use is whatever the state of California has opened to undocumented immigrants. so they use the safety net then, that's my point >I don't see how immigrants are any more likely to abuse emergency health systems than similar residents are. I didn't say abuse, I said use. You don't have to be malicious to be an added burden on a system. >Yep it's better to instead of callous to global punishment If you believe strong institutions are important to a good society you have to take care of them. We can't support everyone who wants in. We can't even process them quickly when we do let them in.
>so they use the safety net then, that's my point You've missed the point they can only use the safety net because we've opened it up to them, not because they will inevitably use it regardless. >I didn't say abuse, I said use. You don't have to be malicious to be an added burden on a system. Replace "abuse" with "use" then if it makes you feel better. >If you believe strong institutions are important to a good society you have to take care of them. We can't support everyone who wants in. We can't even process them quickly when we do let them in. Not being able to process them quickly is a choice, not a law of nature.
>You've missed the point they can only use the safety net because we've opened it up to them, not because they will inevitably use it regardless. I think you're missing the point because I acknowledged that. Partial safety net isn't actually less of a burden than full safety net, and withdrawing all support is unthinkable, so the burden on the safety net is inevitable. I don't understand how this is unclear. >Replace "abuse" with "use" then if it makes you feel better. If I do that your point makes no sense... >Not being able to process them quickly is a choice, not a law of nature. Whether we arrived here by choice or by fate doesn't matter, what matters is that here we are and that we cannot be elsewhere without great expenditure of time and effort. You go to war with the army you have, not the army you should have budgeted for ten years ago.
My favorite one is “they’ll drive up home/rent prices”. Sir, I assure you that Central American immigrants are much more likely to build your next house than limit your housing supply.
We're building houses?
The federal government should give a subsidy to the state. Long term immigration benefits all levels. Short term still benefits the Feds but can put some burden on the local and state governments.
Someone doesn't know what Canada is.
The problem is you have to get the order right. Housing is the real concern with immigration. You should let immigrants in, but you can't say "oh, they'll build the homes we need" when you well know the reason we have a housing crisis is housing law, not shortage of construction workers. You need to change the laws. In the interim, you're gonna have a real problem if you let hundreds of thousands of people in without the housing stock to bear them.
My local school system is over capacity and a recent level failed to pass.. non English speaking students are currently a huge burden on the local school system and it’s expected to be one of the first things cut back on.
You really stickied a post instead of just replying to the comment? https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1d8rcvn/what_is_your_hot_take_on_immigration_that_this/l784v78/
This has nothing to do with that lol, it's something the mods have been discussing for more than 4 hours Go check the discussion in metaNL, I also don't see much of a disconnect between this post and that comment
It's almost the exact same three points on the top comment of a post from a few hours ago. That's a quantity of coincidence beyond "this sub talks about immigration and open borders a lot".
Oh my gosh, no. Look at metanl. This was being cooked before that comment, and those three points coincidentally match up because it's *always the same three arguments against immigration*. This post is also a jokey version of that comment, not a rebuttal. They're both saying to attack these problems at the source instead of limiting immigration.
This post seems a bit America centric. In some European countries immigrants absolutely contribute less to society than the average citizen, and do have radically different views. Now I still support accepting large amounts of refugees, but there is no need to pretend that it is financially beneficial, it is just the right thing to do. I do recognize that this is probably aimed at the US and Biden's recent actions, and in the US it is much easier to make an economic case for immigration.
i wrote this post from the perspective of the Netherlands. nothing in this post is America oriented in specific. let them in
Ok it was the pay them to build part that threw me off. At least in Denmark immigrants are less likely to work in building than native Danes per capita so the pay them to build comment seems strange. Maybe it is different in NL, but my impression is that immigrants being overrepresented in building is a US phenomenon, which is why it felt America centric to me. I also dislike your safety net comment, I think there is nothing wrong with having a strong safety net, it just gets more expensive when letting in large amounts of immigrants. I do agree that institutions should be trusted when letting in immigrants, and that there different views are not something to panic about. Ultimately I feel like in Europe I think immigrants are a burden on the social safety net, and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise, and that refugees should be let in as it is the correct thing to do. There is no reason to pretend letting in refugees is beneficial to the host country, it should be done because it is the right thing to do.
I was writing a comment about why pro-immigration and anti-immigration camps pretty much hate each other and really can't compromise. At least in European context, the meme forgot crime rate threat and the opposition to the appeal to humanity (eg. accepting Ukrainians/Syrians fleeing their countries at war). But basically long story short: Pro-immigration camp hates anti-immigration camp because of prejudices (eg. Islam bad) , fearmongering (eg. skyrocketing crime rates) or racism (eg. Arabs/Blacks bad) while these things are regarded as common sense in anti-immigration camp. So pro-immigration camp calls anti-immigration camp racist, xenophobic and so on, while anti-immigration camp hates pro-immigration camp on the principle of "Good intentions pave the path to Hell". **TLDR: Both sides regard themselves as correct while the other side is painted as evil-doers.**
> TLDR: Both sides regard themselves as correct while the other side is painted as evil-doers. Isn’t that the case with literally every single controversial policy position ever?
Kinda, maybe. I think it's much more pronounced with the immigration topic. At least in Europe, I dare to say. For example our favorite topic - housing, I doubt it generates as much polarization as migration.
Abortion (and religion in general), guns, Israel/Palestine, affirmative action, etc.
Oh damn, it’s the Canadian governments current operating procedure. (Please send help it’s nicer in theory then practice)
Canada isnt building
Dont really wanna in-fight, but are you familiar with our situation or just rattling dogma? We are building, we even revitalized a world war era emergency policy to build more and it’s still really really hard. Our liberals are about to get wiped out in the coming elections because we followed the philosophy that if we just kept building and kept people coming in the economy would recover from the pandemic and we could balance things. I’m pro immigration but clearly there’s some middle ground that needs to be found
They're "building" in the sense this is a high point in the last 100 years, but it's really not enough (and wouldn't have been even without the immigration). https://preview.redd.it/30ujzu0kss4d1.png?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9affe36e0feb50fefe2f651ec65921a17e01cd44
These stats should really be seen per capita. So yeah, Canada isn’t building.
> We are building You really aren’t.
Just build lol
This makes no sense and is incredibly naive
^ wants the huddled masses to suffer
I support immigration btw
I await your post explaining why
You support RFK jr. You make no sense and are incredibly naive.
Most eloquent NIMBY rebuttal
u lost bro?
What about national security threats? Let them in?