Open borders will, at first, cause downward pressure on wages, as the labor pool of workers able and willing to perform work for a lower price grows. The magnitude would be more pronounced than with what we've been currently able to observe with controlled borders, because the article proposes a scenario where welfare and public assistance would readily apply to newcomers too. In fact, there would be a growth in the lucrative industry of coyotes who offer transportation and relocation assistance, because their line of work would now be legitimate.
Increased demand for housing will cause costs to spike, which means that those most willing and able to pay larger amounts will live where they wish, and everyone else will be relegated to far outskirts, including nonimmigrants whose incomes fall further behind cost of living. In this scheme, generous profits will be made by landowners of high-demand locations, and shareholders of corporations who can take advantage of the influx of labor and the expanded customer base. It's not too different from our world's current direction, except within a particular state, the absolute numbers of the wage class and the underclass would be much larger.
>Because the article proposes a scenario where welfare and public assistance would readily apply to newcomers too.
FTA: “If the worry is that future migrants might not pay their way, why not charge them more for visas, or make them pay extra taxes, or restrict their access to welfare benefits? Such levies could also be used to regulate the flow of migrants, thus avoiding big, sudden surges.”
Because illegal immigrants do not use visas. So you would be hurting law-abiding people and encouraging circumventing the law - if you can't afford the visa anyway, the question of "should I just through the hoops to get legal visa or try illegal immigration" becomes moot.
> make them pay extra taxes
Why would they pay those taxes? They'd just work on black market and report zero income and apply for welfare. High tax burdens reliably breeds avoidance and lack of compliance, especially in population that is kinda on the sidelines of the law as it is, as it often happens with migrants. And of course it would also sell awfully in the press - imagine an article of how a migrant from Guatemala pays a higher tax rate taxes than a billionaire born in New Jersey - how that would look in next congressional debate?
> restrict their access to welfare benefits
You can do it, but then you'd get exactly what welfare benefits are created to remove - a large population of people who do not have access to basic services, and thus have high level of disease, crime, misery and human suffering. If you accept the idea that welfare benefits are necessary because we should not have too many people like that in our society, then denying people in the country these benefits because they were born in wrong place contradicts this idea. Gating the access to this system on immigration status contradicts the whole premise of having the welfare system. I don't think there's a logically consistent model of welfare state with open borders at all - unless we somehow postulate that welfare spending has a reasonably low upper bound, which I haven't seen proven anywhere.
> Such levies could also be used to regulate the flow of migrants,
Of course you could, but why charging lots of money for visa would be more effective in solving problems we have now than any other method that's been used?
> thus avoiding big, sudden surges.”
Big, sudden surges usually happen due to wars, famines, economic collapses and other such events, in which case I seriously doubt visa prices are going to change anything.
Easy solution to all this. End income taxes. Make consumption tax + national id system. With id you pay 4%, without you pay 15-20%. Make the consumption tax be on everything : Wages, Rent, Mortgage, Food, etc... if you spend money on something it's taxed at the point of payment. - By wages - I mean the company pays the tax. If a person or company pays money or exchanges money it's taxed. Shareholder dividends, CEO bonuses, all taxed.
You could then fund a guaranteed basic income (for citizens only), and just adjust the sales/tax yearly to balance the budget-- everyone pays taxes, no deductions are given, but GBI would guarantee people wouldn't live in poverty at all. It'd be easier to manage technically so we could dismantle welfare and handout programs as well as the IRS.
With current political and budget system, I don't see any path to this ever happening. Maybe in theory that could be a better solution (I don't know, it would need thorough analysis) but I don't see how it could happen in reality.
> You could then fund a guaranteed basic income (for citizens only),
Again, same argument applies. If GBU is a benefit for society, there's no reason to gate it on citizenship - we'd be just limiting the benefit on irrelevant metric, it's like demanding to lower your own salary if your boss' last name begins with certain letter - it'd be irrational. If, however, it is not beneficial to society but is a wealth transfer which benefits one group while hurting another, because the former has more political clout - one should argue this should never be done at all, citizen or not.
I'd be for a universal gbi -- if it's built on blockchain, w/ tax system builtin via transaction fee, perhaps it's tied to an identity coin, and each identity has a 'score' on how unique that person 'appears' to the algorithm, and using a combination of biometrics (like iris scan), and social graph. The more 'unique' or seemlingly unique/trusted the person is as an individual the less transaction fee they pay per transaction.
Something like this could then be adopted as a global currency and have gbi paid out to all members monthly. Perhaps we could create a not-for-profit corp that creates small businesses where 100% of left over income goes back to consumers who use the store (think grocery) and workers who work in the store as a bonus.
A 4% consumption tax wouldn't be nearly enough to maintain current tax revenues. And consumption taxes are highly regressive; the poor have to spend almost all their income on consumption.
Consumption would include all money exchanged. If you invest in the stock market for example $ paid to broker, and money invested would be taxed as it leaves your hand. When you pull it back, broker/investment firm pays the consumption tax because it's leaving them, going back to you.
Anything a company pays money for goes to consumption including: Wages, Power bill, Land, Buildings, Planes, Trains, Transportation of Goods.
Poor would be offset by guaranteed basic income and universal healthcare. GBI would basically be a negative income tax, the 4% is variable and can be raised/lowered yearly whether the country's in the black/red - but only 1-2 points per year w/ congress's approval. Also 4% was just a number I pulled out of ass, could be 7 or 8% instead.
I don't see how poor would suffer under this if they have a guaranteed 30-40k income if they don't work one day the entire year. Sure they might spend all of that back in food, tax, shelter, etc..but they have food, and shelter which they may not have had before.
The only stipulation on GBI would be you must have a residence to collect. (If you want to remain homeless and spend all cash on Meth, that won't work, you need to at least get housing).
there could be a land/resource tax on top, for property owners. If you own land > $200k in value, you'd pay a specific tax on the land, if you use resources you pay a tax on that on-going including:Water, Coal, Natural Gas, Oil - if it comes from the earth, it'd be taxed.
I've heard of schemes that involve fully paying for GBI using ONLY land/resource taxes, but I think that wouldn't be enough to pay for things. But we don't need a military as big as we have, there's lots of places we can cut corners and spend less money.
WE need to explore our budget and use tech to lower costs across the board as much as possible and streamline things.
I've thought about that a lot (I'm pro open-borders). I think we should get rid of income taxes, instead move to consumption taxes (money out is taxed) examples: Paying for anything: Rent, Food, Wages, Shareholders/Dividends, Estate transfer, Boats, Trains, Planes, etc... If you exchange money for ANYTHING it's taxed on the payers' side of the transaction. -- Then create a fair-id system so every citizen has an id, if you go to the store and forget your id you pay 15% sales tax, if you have your id you pay 4%.
This would immediately make non-documented people and visitors with greencards pay a lot of taxes. It's their choice if they want to stay/pay or go and not-pay their share, but the republicans can stop whining about immigrants not paying their fair share if they pay 3 times the sales tax.
So go back to 99% of just taxing the poor (progressive taxes make taxes very low for very low incomes) ? And in the process create an almost absurdly large incentive for the black market to go back to the levels it last existed at centuries ago. Without deductions, owning a house is back to utterly impossible for anyone who doesn't currently own one. At those levels all other laws become ineffective too, as at that point sausages in the supermarket will have the same quality control as illegal drugs have today. Illegal production, dumping, ... all comes with enormous incentives under such a scheme.
Maybe do some research before suggesting something like this.
There is a deduction of sorts.. It's guaranteed basic income. Give everyone 3000 a month per household + 500 per dependent.
Those who own homes/land/property will pay more because they're expenditures are more.
Example: You earn 70k per year, you get 30k for gbi. That's 100k. Of that, you spend 80% on housing, school, food, clothes, toys, w/e, and invest 20% for retirement.
Of that 80% you spend 5% on taxes via sales tax. So roughly $4,000 a year in taxes.
If you earned 30k, and didn't work at all i.e. 30k from gbi alone, and spent all of it, you'd have spent 1500 on taxes, but still be able to feed/clothe/house a family in at least some comfort.
I don't see how that makes life unbearable for everyone? If you're an immigrant who isn't a citizen yet, you'd pay a bit more, but that's the price of coming to America, deal w/ it. At least you'll never be deported, or have your family ripped away from you, etc...
This is a libertarian pipe-dream that will never happen in the current political climate. They envision free movement and no welfare/safety-net (for at least alien immigrants). Even if that is federal policy, states and cities will pick up the slack.
The rest? Just another way to end up with millions of undocumented/illegal immigrants (like we have currently with impossible standards to meet for legal immigration). Can't force someone to pay "extra taxes" if they are working under the table for slave wages.
No doubt The Economist could care less if migrants pay taxes, for them they pay their way solely by providing cheap labor to businesses.
Estimates show undocumented immigrants are net contributors to welfare, they pay taxes but they can’t apply for most benefits that they’re paying into.
Yeah, that is total BS. BTW they are not "undocumented" as if their dog ate their passport: they are illegal immigrants.
The total local, state, federal burden of all the benefits they receive, greatly outweighs the pitiful amount they pay in taxes. 2017 stats indicate $19B paid into the system, $135B in services taken out: a net $116B loss to America. https://www.scribd.com/document/359997156/Cost-Study-2017-We...
Even if you say that "FAIR is biased", and discount the numbers by 50%, you still have a negative impact of over $50B a year.
California, ALONE, spends over $30 billion a year on services for illegals.
$10.6 billion in paid taxes: according to your link "overall effective tax rate of 6.4 percent". Explain how that is fair, please...
Most citizens are not net contributors to welfare. It sounds like you dislike welfare, not immigrants.
People who come here legally and illegally are just like you and me, wanting the same things, to work, live, and provide a better future for their children. They are human beings.
But I get it... freedom and markets when it benefits you and exclusion and socialism when it doesn’t.
I don't get it, "Estimates show undocumented immigrants are net contributors to welfare" yet "Most citizens are not net contributors to welfare". Is it because undocumented immigrants "pay taxes but they can’t apply for most benefits that they’re paying into" (even though in many jurisdictions they can and do)? Even if true, there are far more legal citizens in the US than alien immigrants, and most of those are not on welfare. I just can't square what you are saying here with your previous comment.
> People who come here legally and illegally are just like you and me, wanting the same things, to work, live, and provide a better future for their children. They are human beings.
That's great, but it still affects people already legally here who also want to "work, live, and provide a better future for their children". The H-1B program gets a lot of ire from these parts because it has a downward effect on salaries and job availability for US citizens in the tech sector. But I guess that's no problem when it's the same deal just for jobs none of us would ever consider.
This is all very interesting and some of this makes sense, but like most economics practice, it's utterly impossible to predict the moves and motives of every party involved when change economic policy. In other words - this all sounds good, but people are irrational and it's hard to predict that irrationality on a global scale.
Source - Every economists research that either does or does not come true from proposed changes in economic policy.
>In fact, there would be a growth in the lucrative industry of coyotes who offer transportation and relocation assistance, because their line of work would now be legitimate.
This is true if you define 'coyote' as anyone who transports an immigrant to their destination country. Most people would just call them 'airlines', just as immigrants used to arrive on 'ocean liners'.
>Increased demand for housing will cause costs to spike
This is only true in the presence of severe restrictions on supply. These exist in some, but not all, areas of the United States with high immigrant populations. http://www.nber.org/papers/w13071.pdf
>It's not too different from our world's current direction, except within a particular state, the absolute numbers of the wage class and the underclass would be much larger.
That's inconsistent with the data, considering economic immigrants nearly always end up better off. Did you mean that the native plebs wouldn't be getting richer? That's at least arguable, but carries some interesting connotations.
My thoughts too, and the article sort of says this at the end.
If the worry is that future migrants might not pay their way, why not charge them more for visas, or make them pay extra taxes, or restrict their access to welfare benefits? Such levies could also be used to regulate the flow of migrants, thus avoiding big, sudden surges.
This is what the US does right now through the lottery system but it's just so restricted that no one in their right mind could call the US borders "open".
What do you mean? The lottery just gives you a green card. Once you have it, you can apply for naturalization in 5 years. Once you get your citizenship, you have pretty much all the rights and benefits as any other citizen, except you can't get elected president.
I was more referring to the big sudden surges part in that there is in fact a lottery acting to regulate the flow of migrants. I'd even go so far as to say that under many circumstances, a green card gets you many of the important rights and benefits as any US citizen (other than voting of course).
If this was true, then US being the biggest immigrant-friendly country in the world, would do so in a heartbeat. But neither the government nor corporations are advocating this. America currently has the biggest economy in the world, an average of $58,000 income, a low 3.9% unemployment rate while enjoying GDP growth rate of close to 5% in Q2, as well as close to 220,000 new jobs every month, and growth in wage increases. In some areas (like silicon valley), employees are offered 200k-300k salaries. It got to here by having a strong republic/democracy and rules and laws, support technologies in public and private sectors, limit immigration to skill-based, and recently choosing to lower corporate tax rate and reduce corporation regulations.
A lot of how we “got to here” has to do with being all the was left after WWII. Trying to pretend like all the things you advocate for are the reasons for prosperity is silly. Your statement is basically, “things are good now and they are good because <insert political platform>”
There are other periods of time that have been as good or better with a different political platform. In the 1950s (when America was “great”) the top tax rate was 90%.
Federal politics and the economy are linked, but not 1:1 and the net impact of changes to federal law often isn’t felt for years or decades (if at all).
Sure, and we could have blown the lead in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the 00s, the 10s, etc. But we didn't. We valued entrepreneurship, hard work, and being the best.
50s was an anomaly with a 36% growth rate, like you said, because we were all that were left. The economy currently is very stable, diversified, and fast growing still for its size, some 70 years later.
My point is that most of where we are today can be attributed to the post war advantage and not any specific policy decision. We are increasingly losing ground to China in terms of output and GDP growth and losing out massively to Europe in terms of quality of life.
Increased immigration of low-class workers is politically unpopular in the heartland. In fact, even importing certain skilled workers is unpopular among the rank-and-file, as casual criticism of H1-Bs shows.
Instead, since the 1970s, US thought leaders and business leaders of both parties long pursued similar trade policies that embraced deregulation and open markets, which allowed similar gains to be realized by US businesses operating in a globalized world (e.g. outsourcing, offshoring, integrated supply chains).
SV companies pay generously because dozens of companies flush with cash are all competing for the same pool of veterans of other companies. Any company that has less profit per employee (most small businesses) can scarcely afford to pay a premium for rank-and-file employees with domain experience; nor is there enough effortless mobility in specialty skilled manufacturing roles to make such escalating wages necessary.
How does the rosiness of this assessment jive with the UN’s report that 40 million Americans live in poverty? Perhaps they are an ancillary component of such a Republic?
it would appear US is in similar leagues with Canada, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, etc, of having close to 0-1% in poverty. Check out the other countries in Asia or Africa if you really think America has it bad.
The higher growth in q2 is temporary, because we juiced our economy with the tax cut for rich people and tax change to allow companies to bring money from overseas and pay it out to shareholders. In the 5-10 year period, we'll have significantly increased our national debt for this temporary cut.
The USA is the size of a continent, so perhaps a fair(er) comparison would be to add all the immigrants in Europe. That's ignoring the fact that most people don't migrate to the USA because it's immigrant friendly but because of other factors such as proximity, language, and economy, and ease of access. Living in the USA as an undocumented immigrant is not that great. The balance is also tipping at the moment (e.g. more people are leaving the USA than entering the USA, currently).
If you look at the figures for net migration per 1000 inhabitants[1], the USA and Germany are pretty much the same for the period between 2007 and 2012: 15.94 per 1K and 15.54 per 1K respectively. For 2017, the USA sits at 3.9 (Canada 5.70).
1) legal?
2) Historical laws vs current laws
3) Adjust for population size
Even for say Software Eng. moving to US is a very f@#$up process, but pretty much any other country is trivial often with immediately being permanent resident or some visa that converts to PR in 1-2 years.
ive got into the us on an O1 and now have a EB1 green card. i also founded a fairly big agency in Denmark hiring people from around the world so yeah I would say i have experience :)
I think it depends on a lot of factors. i.e. how much money you have, education background, prior experience and very significantly the country you're coming from.
Not to discount your experience, i am sure you've been through a lot of paperwork (i know i sure have, and i'm yet to meet someone who enjoys immigration departments!) but the US is pretty damn tough if you are not a) wealthy and/or b) highly educated and in demand.
I think you are ignoring the time to PR part.
EB1 current processing time is 8 month (and you have to have 1 mil) the requirements are very strict
You can buy a 500K property in Cyprus/Portugal etc and become resident (latvia 250K)without any requirement to run a business or hire people etc.
Cmon H1B is done once a year and there is lottery with 50% chance of wining (spouse can not work)
E visa are business visas and only for people from treaty trader countries plus they do not convert to PR
L visas you have to work for the subsidiary for 1 year there is a limit on L visa length
In Czcech Republic, Estonia etc. you need 10K to get residency through business and there are no requirements to hire people etc.
I am not ignoring anything. I have tried both hiring into the EU and from EU to the US.
Also you need to make the proper comparison with EU not just cherry pick a few countries. I can cherry pick countries to where it's very hard (try Denmark for instance).
My claim was EU vs US again 11 million illegal immigrants living here and for a large part contributing to the economy that alone would never happen in the EU.
And you don't need 1Million for a EB1. It's a merrit based greencard (just like O1 visa is)
Exactly coming from outside of EU you can become a resident of EU state that has simplest procedure and yet after that you are able to work and live in any EU state which makes immigration to EU trivial compared to US.
You've got be kidding the only realistic option for US is H1B majority of EU countries have simple visa's for Software Eng. with no quotas. My former employees from Ukraine are in Germany, Austria, Norway, Ireland, Estonia, Poland, Czech Republic (and outside of EU Australia, Canada) the process was 2-3 month on avg. for EU countries and they become residents pretty quickly with no quotas.
theres no quota on an O visa and you have L visas and a bunch of others on top of H1B plus the lottery plus 11 million illegal immigrants living and often working here even paying taxes. I can assure you IAm not kidding and that you should learn a little about just how open the US is compared to the EU.
How having 11 million illegal immigrants is being open :)?
In Ireland it would take 2 month to get work visa that becomes PR after 2 years. L1 is only for transfers anyone that can qualify for US O visa are welcome anywhere in the world.
How many illegal immigrants are working in the EU. You don't just get a work visa. Believe me I have dealt with it as the owner of a company in Denmark hiring people from outside the EU.
In EU fewer because they actually let people settle. There was about 1 mil iligal workers from Ukraine alone but now poland is handing out visas even to unskilled workers so people mostly enter EU legally
If they are legal yes and thats the discussion here. I repeat, its easier to get into the us legally than the eu. You want to count how many drowned to get into the eu? The EU isnt any better and 11 million people living illegally in the us on top of how many of them are immigrants the last 80 yearsshould be an indication of just how absurd the claims about the us immigration politics are.
>"but pretty much any other country is trivial often with immediately being permanent resident or some visa that converts to PR in 1-2 years."
Not at all. I know a couple that tried to move to Canada after Trump got elected but were shocked to find out they'd have to deposit 250k USD with the Canadian government for 5 years in order to be considered for permanantly residency.
Not only that, the demand for people to move into the US is tremendous so the competition is obviously very steep compared to less desireable places.
If they are from US and for some very strange reason can not get enough points to pass the simplest route is 1 person from the couple goes to college in Canada (even the cheapest one) the second person can get work permit based on being spouse of a student (student can work half time too) With 1 year of work experience and a Canadian degree they will have enough points for PR.
We are comparing US and Canada. If person already has a degree a similar degree can be chosen that will require 1+/- year of study at a cost below 10K. The spouse can work during this year and the student can work halftime. This will be enough to get PR. In US the spouse will not have right to work the student can work on campus the minimal cost will be in 30K range, after getting the degree the former student (if the degree is appropriate) can work for 1-2 years in US if employer applies for H1B and the lucky former student wins the lot. he will be able to continue working and US employer can apply for GC (subject to far more req than in Canada) minimum time to GC in US in this scenario will be 4-5 years (realistically 6-7 provided the student was not from China or India) and in Canada about 2.
Would you please edit the uncivil snips like "BS" and "You've got to be kidding" out of your comments here? We're trying for a bit better than internet median, and taking little shots like that lowers the discussion quality and encourages worse.
Done sorry for anyone that had a pleasure of going through US immigration system the notion that it is "friendly" will steer up a lot of strong feelings.
Here's what is happening large companies tired of dealing with this system have setup offices in Ireland, Canada etc.
When they want to hire people from outside US they move them to Ireland, Canada etc. and than will either keep them there or move them to US on H1B (if they win the lot.) or GC (takes 2 years+). So outside of loosing 2 years of tax revenue (or all future years of tax revenue based on them staying in satelite office I am honestly confused of what is exactly the benefit to US.
It's pretty accurate if you consider immigration overall, and for one simple reason: US has the most extensive family immigration eligibility, at least among developed countries. In Canada, for example, you can't sponsor your grandparents for permanent residence; but in US, you can. This is also why US is the only developed country dominated by family rather than skilled immigration, by the way.
I stand corrected wrt this particular category and Canada. It's not the case for most other countries, though. And it is still the case that more family members are eligible in US than most other places. That US has a lot more family immigration compared to others is also an objective fact.
A world of free movement will not have a single welfare state.
Even after decades, and generations, immigrants from certain regions have absolutely abysmal rates of employment in more developed countries they have settled in. How would an even larger scale of immigration flip the trend we can already witness, a complete 180 degrees? Many seem completely content on living on benefits alone, or fully unable to find employment with the skill set they have gathered, even when they have born in the country where the natives fare much better. The way I see it, the money that is being spent on these people could be spent with a far better interest elsewhere.
78 trillion, truly, is a fantasy pulled from a behind.
I don't know where you got your information from. It's half true. No, immigrants do not have abysmal rates of employment. The unemployment rate for foreign-born persons in the United States was 4.1 percent in 2017 compared to 4.4 percent for native-born persons (Dept of Labor, Labor Force Characteristics of Foreign-born Workers Summary).
Immigrants do use more entitlement than native-borns, but that's because immigrants tend to have more children. Given how low the fertility rate for native-borns is, the entitlement that immigrants use to bring up their children probably pays itself off once the children grow up and contribute to the economy.
> No, immigrants do not have abysmal rates of employment
I think it depends on the specific form of migration to that country. For example the USA or Switzerland have very high skilled people coming to their country. In Germany too, but there was and is also a large influx of very uneducated migrants. Currently 55% of all welfare recipients in Germany are people with a migration background which shows that the opportunities/capabilities are not equal.
I do think though that welfare can still work with free movement, it is just that there would need to be a similar level in all/many countries.
I would also like to ask to whom would the majority of that increase in wealth go? I would argue it wouldn't be to the people doing the moving. It would be to the people driving them to move.
The increase in wealth from someone moving from a poor to a rich country is massive, and far more than the marginal benefit to an employer from hiring them rather than a slightly more expensive alternative person.
Actually, in the proper context, it isn't. In fact, it's pitiful compared to the increase in wealth resulting from focusing on turning the poor country into a rich one.
THAT'S the biggest economic story of the last several decades; and to first order, immigration is only relevant to the extent that it facilitates more rapid development of China/India/Rwanda/etc. The US electorate is still more annoyed by predominantly Mexican/Central American illegal immigration than the combination of reverse-mercantilist trade policy, foreign student education and practical training, outsourcing, and tech transfer that the US has deployed to facilitate the development of China, India, and many countries before and after them. The total positive impact of the latter is easily >20x as large as the former, higher-cost policy.
You don't get to discount China/India/etc.'s growth as "inevitable catch-up growth" on one side of the equation, yet fully count it on the other side.
As a consequence, I support reverse-mercantilist trade policy, foreign student education and practical training, outsourcing, and tech transfer, especially for countries like India which both have a lot to gain and are strategically highly aligned with the US (I acknowledge that China is now a more complicated case), to the extent that Americans can continue to bear these things. (Canadians and Australians seem to be fine with continuing these practices indefinitely, while also letting a pretty high number of skilled nonwhite foreigners from poor countries settle permanently.) And I violently oppose the grossly inefficient mass-low-skill-immigration policy that threatens to turn Americans, Germans, and others against the overall project while accomplishing so little.
An immigrant will capture a much smaller share of the value they generate, otherwise why use them, than a native born citizen.
This means that while theoretically 'wealth' is increasing it is increasing in such a way that those who are in the position to pay wages keep more of them and those in the position to receive them get much less.
In short then what's the point of an average in a power law distribution which by definition does not have a defined average?
Or to put it even more dumbly would you rather live in a world of 100 units of wealth distributed between the 5 quintiles as [80.0, 16.0, 3.2, 0.64, 0.128] or one of 20 units distributed as [6,5,4,3,2]. For 2/3rds of the people in the world the second would be better.
> An immigrant will capture a much smaller share of the value they generate, otherwise why use them, than a native born citizen.
Why not use them, if they're more qualified?
The only reason why employers can fleece immigrants in US today, is because immigrants are effectively "locked in" - e.g. if you're on H1-B, you can't change employers without going through a bunch of paperwork; and if you get fired, they just kick you out of the country. Which, obviously, means that you can't negotiate from the same position of strength as a native. But remove those, and why do you think an immigrant would demand to be paid any less? We're not stupid.
>But remove those, and why do you think an immigrant would demand to be paid any less? We're not stupid.
Because you're poor. An Indian in India makes 1/20th the wage a US citizen makes in the US. If they get 1/15th you have just received a huge raise and are happy.
You forget that if you live and work in US, your cost of living is also the same as any native. 1/15th would only be attractive to person in India at Indian prices.
Besides, why would someone take 1/15th, if they can have the whole thing? I mean, by a similar logic, you'd expect people in US readily undercut each other at 1/2th, 1/4th etc in a race to the bottom. But we don't.
People in the US have to support a family at US living standards. Indians on the other hand either have their family in India or are used to living in conditions that Americans balk at, multiple people per room, no lawn, one car or less per family.
Listening to the dumps some of my co workers live in I can see why median hourly wages have not increased in the last 40 years.
This is political economy 101. One of Malthus's suggestions for reducing the mortality rate was getting exotic materials to become staples of life so food wouldn't be the limiting factor of population.
Extending that analogy to corporate entities, you imply that anyone with competing offers from Google and local Arco AM/PM Gas Station is better off choosing the latter one, even if Google’s offer is more competitive? Because, after all, Google is likely to extract more wealth out of that careet stint than Arco, and implicitly screw the employee over?
Your confusing the locally optimal choice of a single member within a system to apply to a description of a more globally optimal state of the system overall.
Supposing this is true, does it matter, if the overall size of the pie increases? Isn't everyone better off? Would you rather the poor stay poor so that the rich don't get richer?
I think all you have to do is look at modern American income disparity in the United States over the last 50 or so years and you have your answer. Sure, the poorest did become moderately better off financially in terms of wages. Yet did there quality of life increase? I would argue that the size of the pie is irrelevant past the point of what is required for basic survival. What truely matters is the relative size of the pieces. Especially in a country where we have equated money with speech.
The income disparity is the game of numbers. When Jeff Bezos’ income increases due to the work of his US employees, people notice. When Saudi Arabian King’s net worth increases due to the work of his US employees (and employees of any affiliated companies controlled by Saudis), people don’t notice it as much, since the King does not file a personal tax return with IRS.
If you were to strip everybody in the Forbes 1000 list of their US citizenship (someone like Singapore or Monaco would surely step up to provide them with a valid passport), relieve them of IRS personal income filing duty, but allow their money to stay in the US economy, the economy would look the same and act the same. But the income disparity numbers would look much brighter.
You rightly point out that income disparity metrics can be manipulated, but changing the calculation (eg by ignoring Bezos) does nothing to change the actual disparity, it just makes it harder to detect... So what exactly is your point?
That the stat is not only subject to manipulation, it’s pointless.
If every American shopped on Rakuten vs Amazon, bought Samsung vs Apple, searched on Yandex instead of Google, banked at Barclays vs Chase, took a Didi vs Uber, if every hedge fund manager was based in Zurich vs Greenwich, US income disparity would not be so jarring, as the wealth would accrue elsewhere, exporting the income disparity with it.
You seriously think poor people's quality of life hasn't increased in the last 50 years?
Go drive around "working poor" neighborhoods right after Christmas and see how many huge flat-screen TV boxes are curbside waiting for "big trash day" (small hint: a lot) or see how many people don't have smartphones.
I would argue that Wallyworld did more to bring up the standard of living for poor people than the last 50 years of social engineering but I know how much people like the downmod button...
The cost of huge flat-screen TVs has plummeted. Meanwhile, the cost of housing and healthcare is going through the roof in most of the western world. It very much does not follow that people who have the disposable income to purchase techno-toys can support their basic needs.
The cost of most things has plummeted since 50 years ago which, arguably, improves people's lives.
And, btw, I wasn't proposing some new measure of Quality of Life through the size of the living room TV but using it as an illustrative example of technology becoming more accessible to more people at lower costs. Same with the smartphone reference, having the sum total of human knowledge at your fingertips seems like a quick and easy way to improve one's lot in life.
I do wonder if people would complain if Walmart managed to decrease housing and healthcare costs using their aggressive bargaining tactics like they've done with generic prescription drugs?
cost of housing proportional to wages, cost of healthcare proportional to wages, access to education and the quality of that education, overall life expectancy, likelyhood of incarceration, etc.
>Go drive around "working poor" neighborhoods right after Christmas and see how many huge flat-screen TV boxes are curbside waiting for "big trash day" (small hint: a lot) or see how many people don't have smartphones.
Perhaps the hedonistic acquisition of inessential physical goods is not necessarily commensurate with a higher standard of living?
While there has been progress in the past 50 years, there has certainly also been much regress. When measuring the advancement of a civilization, it seems something other than the pervasiveness of bigger, cheaper screens for reruns of Baywatch (et al.) should be the yardstick.
> Wallyworld did more to bring up the standard of living
The quality of food Walmart sells is abysmal. The pressure Walmart put on food manufactures to drop prices played a significant role in the malnutrition and obesity in the us. TVs and smart phones are a very small part of Quality of Life. Having fulfilling work, good health, and a clean environment are more important aspects that Walmart worsen.
> The pressure Walmart put on food manufactures to drop prices played a significant role in the malnutrition and obesity in the us.
Making food less expensive is bad? Never really understood that argument but maybe it's just me...
There are studies on the percentage of income a family spends on food today vs. some time in the past (with "time" depending on whatever study you look at) and it has steadily declined. Less money spent on food == more money to spend on some other necessary thing to live a quality life.
Also, I'd put more blame on the USDA[0] for "obesity in the us" than Wallyworld selling people what they want to buy. People grow up believing in the Food Pyramid and end up becoming overweight through a "well balanced diet" dreamed up through regulatory capture.
So many people miss this point. Most things in economics are positive sum games. But most people treat things like zero sum games (if someone gains something then I have less/am able to get less). But people produce products, people produce value. This is exactly why we have an economy. And it grows (meaning positive sum). We've left so much money and value on the table because of this.
I'd be careful making assumptions about the reasons people don't agree with you.
Taking the grandparent comment: "Supposing this is true, does it matter, if the overall size of the pie increases? Isn't everyone better off? Would you rather the poor stay poor so that the rich don't get richer?"
I don't disagree with this point because I believe economics is a zero some game, I disagree with it because it's wrong (it takes "everyone being better off" for granted), and I will be on guard to oppose any other initiatives (say, open borders) suggested by a group that thinks like this.
There's a very good SMBC comic that addresses the "greater pie" fallacy. [1] To summarize: the total economic pie growing and individual slices shrinking are not mutually exclusive.
Even with a larger pie, the people with an ever diminishing share have less control over their lives, more stress, and more uncertainty. There is too great a power disparity arising as a result of inequality.
No idea why this is getting downvoted, as you're entirely correct (obviously). OP is talking about real economic growth as massive amounts of wealth are created. A change in the money supply would create nominal growth, but no change in the underlying quantity of wealth.
Have you tried getting adequate and affordable child care? Fortunately our kids don't need it any more.
It hugely restricts available options. Either from hours available, lengthy waiting lists or simply finding that after paying childcare work is no longer making economic sense.
Hmm, seems like there may have been a reason for the old traditions after all.
The Economist's point is weird/wrong for another reason. Immigrant women have babies too. They can't be both looking after their own children and looking after other people's simultaneously. Expensive childcare doesn't seem like the kind of problem you can permanently fix by just allowing tons of immigration from third world countries.
I guess you’d be surprised by reality buddy, because that’s exactly how my nanny did it when I grew up...she took care of her two kids and me at the same time...it’s like people who have three kids, totally possible and being done everywhere.
Sure, but we're not talking about an additional place here or there. When people say childcare they tend to mean professional daycare, no? That's very much people bottlenecked. But if immigrants are more fertile than the locals, which they usually are at least for a while, then if the Economist was right about immigrants being well employed in construction jobs and hairdressers such, you'd expect an sudden influx to put more pressure on childcare, not less.
> When people say childcare they tend to mean professional daycare
There is a professional daycare on my block. I see the lady who runs it at our corner coffee shop from time to time. Her kids were in there with everyone else’s. (This was a point she marketed.) She’s an immigrant from Kenya.
> When people say childcare they tend to mean professional daycare, no?
Negative. As a child, of a poor family, my childcare was some combination of aunts, cousins, and family friends.
As a parent, while in the military, we often used professional childcare in the form of a daycare. Now, as an engineering, our nanny watches our children along with her own children.
So, personally, childcare has rarely referred to professional childcare.
> When people say childcare they tend to mean professional daycare, no?
No, not necessarily. It's more about availability. Even if you do assume it's "professional" childcare in some manner, it's one of the easiest small businesses to start. The regulations are strict, but the requirements are cheap beyond location and food.
My wife ran a daycare out of our house for a short period when our children were small, as it was more cost effective than having two children in daycare elsewhere.
I've typically seen in the developing world that the nanny looks after her kids as well, but families tend to prefer childless nannies for obvious reasons. Very often in such cases the host family will help with some of the child related expenses of the nanny. Much like some kind of communal family.
>>Have you tried getting adequate and affordable child care?
Nigerian or Mexican immigrants doing that in USA would face the same high rent and expenses as US workers. They might charge a little less and that's it.
Isn’t this a good thing though? That elderly care and childcare is as valuable as otherwise “lucrative work”? Or perhaps what this stage of capitalism has defined as lucrative work isn’t so lucrative.
Proper child care means a high level of interaction with well-educated people who speak crisply perfect English.
For the child, this is a time when they are developing language and cultural habits that will have a lifelong impact, ultimately impacting the quality of their employment and spouse. Immigrants will not provide that. It's hard enough finding non-immigrants who can provide it.
Why do they need to speak perfect English? Are you worried the child will develop an accent or something? Unless the child is spending 24 hours a day with this person for months I don't think that's going to happen. And what "cultural habits" are you worried the child is going to pick up or not pick up from spending time with an immigrant?
Many children grow up fine in families where both parents are immigrants and cannot speak English well. The key point is "a high level of interaction" rather than the competency of the language they speak.
Nonsense. I speak English with a strong Scandinavian accept. My ex speaks RP ("posh" English). Our child minder speaks with a very noticeable South London accent.
Want to guess who he's taken after? His friends. He has a much more neutral accent than either one of us.
That's not to say your interaction or the childminders will have no impact, but if any single person has such a substantial impact on the way your child speaks, then you should be more concerned about their isolation than the English skill of one specific person they're interacting with.
>with well-educated people who speak crisply perfect English
Source? Personally, i'd rather my kid have an immigrant baby sitter speaking and teaching my child in their native language. Plenty of studies around long term intelligence of children learning second languages early on....
What about the research indicating improved cognitive capabilities in adults who became multilingual as children? Isn't it just as likely that children who grow up exposed to multiple cultures end up better able to maneuver through a complicated, multi-cultural world?
Hearing nothing but "crisply perfect English" as children robs them of this gift, and normalizes exclusion to them — at the level of awareness that all of the lessons we learn at that tender age: too deeply even to notice, let alone change, without considerable effort, or some specific motivating factor or event (which, having internalized exclusion, is structurally less likely to happen, in the first place).
Just as a matter of logistics, very few people can have that version of "proper" child care because only so many people are qualified to give it, and there are competing uses for those resources. Feel free to strive for the best, but "the best" is not the only proper thing, lest "proper" be meaningless.
One reason is that people have different ideas what "lucrative" means.
Native-born workers often have advantages (such as speaking the language and understanding the culture) that let them mostly-realistically aspire to better jobs. Even when out of work, they aren't going to decide to be, say, farmworkers, which looks like a a hard, low-paying, temporary, dead-end job to them. Their aspirations have priced them out of the market.
Of course this isn't universal. Immigrants sometimes compete with other people who have a strike against them. Here's an article about the challenges hiring line cooks:
Once there was a time in Europe when every fief couldn't be more happy to get more subjects for free, and the usual travel restriction was on leaving your place, not moving to a new one.
It was the first world war that changed everything.
Things like migration control, passports, visas, formal institute of citizenship, all traces to the time when the imaginary no. 1 boogyman was not Ben Laden and "angry Arab guys," but the German Kaiser and "angry Prussian guys"
The system of rigid citizenship, closed by default borders, and enslavement to a piece of paper called passport was forced onto the world under pretext "if you would not let us do this, the scary Kaiser will be upon you"
This day, it is the permanent surveillance state being pushed into mainstream buy the very same sort of people, and it will be upon the Western countries in no time if that party will not be punched hard in the face with all resolve.
Well, this is all my own, near life long, research: what is power, how modern state came to be, and how one can manipulate it.
Few interesting factoids from it:
Did you know that theocracy vs bureaucracy was not a decided topic in Europe until mid 19 century?
It was a single letter of a British envoy to China that shocked the crown so much as for it to institute the His Majesty Civil Service modelled after Chinese model of professional institute of career bureaucrats. Something that is traced to first Chinese states in known history.
My grandpa said that every modern state is made by "the 3 grave sins of Chinese people:" 1. Invention of paper, 2. Invention of money, 3. Invention of gunpowder. Indeed, without those there will be no career bureaucrats, no central banks, no conscript armies, and no modern state.
And on Prussians, rulers of the old Europe were not as much afraid of Prussian people themselves, than the spread of ideological "Prusianness." Today, the most relevant comparison to them are members of Ikhvan ul Muslimin in the middle east, and how Arab gerantocracy, and nobility is afraid of them as fire.
Just as with Prussia, Qatar is not as scare to Arab rulers than "Qatariness" - the virulent Qatari identity. An identity of people who are not afraid to demand their rulers to be rightful, and reward them with great loyalty for that.
Caring for her own children, she would instill her values as they grow. Her children would most likely get a love of knowledge and a determination to accomplish long-term tasks. Since she can produce many children, the number of people with these values experiences exponential growth from generation to generation.
If she instead outsources love to an immigrant from the third world, that other person will instill third-world values in the children. The likelihood of the children taking after their mother is greatly reduced, down only to any influence of DNA. The culture is not passed on. When fewer than two of the children take after the mother, there is an exponential decline.
In general, your direct impact on the world in nothing compared to the impact that your children can have. This likely applies even to the greatest scientists, and without question it applies to a random ordinary PhD.
What does this even mean? Please elaborate your hierarchy of cultures and their “values.” What about all the wildly successful and educated children of immigrants from these countries who are in the US now?
Do you have anything to support any of these claims? And how does the number of children I choose to have impact my likelihood of being a "helicopter parent" or my ability to contribute to "more science"?
If you think nothing is more valuable than "raising happy kids", have you committed to that position? Do you have a job, or are you a full-time stay-at-home parent? If not, why?
Yes. I was a full-time-home-parent, and now I'm just remoting from home. That being said, there are many valuable things I'm not doing - they don't become less valuable by that, only I do. (for example, it would have been valuable to complete my code now instead of writing this reply)
It depends. As we know intelligence is highly heritable and an extremely large component of one's productivity, it may make more sense, in terms of having an impact, for extremely high-IQ people to focus on have a large number of children, especially considering how rare having a large number of children is among those with high IQs.
If intelligence is a mix between nature and nurture, why not support both? Good child care and good education...
Smart people having more kids is not the full solution, but it is a part of the solution, and a neglected one. People already talk about improving education a lot. But it seems that education can only go so far -- some children get better results unschooled than other children get in schools.
If the marginal income tax rates were lower sure, but once you add in how much gets taken off the top by the government and how much child care costs, it really doesn't justify most jobs that make less than 6 figures.
At the same time, they're not earning income. They're also losing out on experience in their field, putting them at a disadvantage when they do go back to the workforce.
>Unskilled migrants care for babies or the elderly, thus freeing the native-born to do more lucrative work.
I'm sure the same argument was made in favor of slavery way back when it was still legal. After all, slaveowners were free to pursue more meaningful things while their slaves were collapsing of heat exhaustion and malnutrition while working on the plantation.
Illegal immigrants often find "employment" at below minimum wage, and in inhumane working conditions, because otherwise what's the reason to hire them over locals? They're also more likely to be abused or mistreated, because what are you gonna do, go to the police?
A less harsh variant of this often happens with H1Bs, which I know all too well because I was an H1B myself 15 years ago: you get hired for a job that's way below your skill/pay level, and then you keep your mouth shut until you get a green card, which for some nationalities takes a decade or more. Glorified indentured servitude. If you lose your job - GTFO of the country in 2 weeks. Doesn't matter if you have a child or whatever, GTFO anyway.
It boggles the mind that people could be in favor of illegal immigration and H1B abuse, especially if these same people are in favor of worker rights and unionization.
I don’t see how letting 3rd world people strip mine the resources I paid for is a help to me? My wife and I have been in a crisis for months because our son’s school has taken in so many esl kids that nothing is being done to teach him—it is like he got 1/2 a 2nd grade this past year! It is so bad that my wife is now a “former liberal”—America’s kids should come first. We pay the damn taxes. We keep the place clean and decent and nobody is just going to come here and stake a claim to it and run us off so they can turn it into the shithole mess they fled from with gangs and child rapists. Fuck that and fuck them.
It depends how tight the rental market is, if there is a lot more demand than supply it is possible that the full increase would be absorbed in rental increases.
How can they if they have to work full time to take care of their babies?
Part of the problem with today's economy is that it's basically impossible for a middle-class woman to have a child and work. There needs to be a large population of unskilled laborers to do these kinds of low-level jobs that a person with a college degree won't do.
This is why data shows areas with a large population of lower-class have a higher fertility rate.
Your model strongly predicts that fertility of preexisting natives would be higher in areas with more unskilled immigrants. The opposite is true, and the effect is not small.
It is safe to reject your model. Moreover, if you do not adjust your beliefs in response to contrary evidence, it is appropriate to presume that you are arguing in bad faith rather than trying to figure out the truth, and dismiss everything else you say on this subject. (This principle is equally applicable to someone arguing the other side of this particular issue in similar bad faith, of course; reversed stupidity is not intelligence.)
Your model strongly predicts that fertility of preexisting natives
would be higher in areas with more unskilled immigrants. The
opposite is true, and the effect is not small.
It seems like you have a lot of confounding variables to work through to make this case with such confidence, if you have research that makes this case I would like to see links to it.
Yes, there are confounding variables; population density in particular jumps out. But once you acknowledge that population density has enough negative causal impact through various channels on native fertility to be worth explicitly controlling for, you've already rejected mozumder's model: what effect does immigration have on population density?
Why would one acknowledge that population density has a "negative causal impact" without evidence of such? You can argue that density and fertility are correlated, sure, but causation is a much higher bar. Why would you restrict the model such that you assume that any increase in density at any starting level of density would decrease fertility? Why would you assume that without evidence?
Did you have (even a vague) source for this - I'm willing to search for it given even a vague gesture? I think this indeed sounds like it could be strong evidence, so I'd love to see it. Indeed, I would also think that a high skill population living mixed with a low skill population would have a higher birth rate than a high skill population NOT near a low skill population.
You can start from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... and its list of sources, and drill down from there. Remember to subtract births to recent immigrants from the numerator, and number of recent immigrants from the denominator. It won't take long to verify my claim.
I am interested in what the data does say, but we should articulate what this discussion is about. I take your post to mean that:
- access to affordable childcare increases fertility rates
- inflows of lower-skilled workers to an area would increase access to affordable childcare
- a way to increase the quantity of lower-skilled workers would be through immigration
The 3rd point above I think is trivial to accept, I am inclined to believe the other two points but would want to see the evidence that this is actually how things shake out.
See my comment above. I've pointed to data that backs up my conclusion. You have not, and I predict that it will be trivial to tear massive holes in whatever source(s) you end up citing.
>If the worry is that immigrants will outvote the locals and impose an uncongenial government on them, one solution would be not to let immigrants vote—for five years, ten years or even a lifetime.
This is actually an interesting idea worth thinking about more. If the concern for those on the right is that more immigrants to the US would cause a permanent electoral Blue Wall by flipping Texas in a couple election cycles, and those on the left see economic migration through a humanitarian lens, then re-thinking what Citizenship means and the rules for participating in a democracy could be on the table as part of a compromise. I imagine a sizable percentage predicate their reason on wanting to come to the United States on earning money, not voting in elections (though I could be wrong, but I don't think I am and I doubt this question gets asked to newcomers). The natural reaction to such a proposal would be that we'd be creating tiers of citizens (Native Born vs Full Citizens vs residents or something along those lines). I don't have a problem with that, per se, but I can see how a lot of people would.
No taxation without representation is a huge part of the culture of the US. I'm guessing suggesting open immigration without voting rights will have a large amount of detractors for this reason. Unless the immigrants aren't taxed, which is kind of the current situation anyway for illegal immigrants.
First of all, the system as described in the article is already effectively in place: once you get your green card, you have to wait 5 years (3 if it's through marriage) before you can naturalize. In that time - or more, if you don't apply immediately - you pay taxes etc, but you cannot vote.
It's even more amusing with non-citizens who aren't green card holders, because not only they still pay all the taxes, but they're denied most of the benefits those taxes fund (so e.g. you still pay social security on your wages, but you don't get to actually claim any payments when a citizen could).
So I don't think there's any insurmountable political obstacle here.
But even beyond that, "taxation without representation", as originally used, didn't actually mean voting rights per se. The complaint, rather, was the lack of anyone specifically representing the interests of the colonies, because they were basically arbitrarily assigned to districts in Britain proper for the purposes of parliamentary election. So not only colonials didn't vote, but their MP would typically never even set foot on the territory he supposedly represented... which is why it was pointed out that it's not really representation.
However, representation was not equated to vote - keep in mind that the original franchise wasn't even universal among white males. However, those that couldn't vote were still deemed to be represented, on the basis that they lived in the same district as the voters.
Even today this principle still applies: while only citizens vote, the number of congressional seats, electors etc is calculated on the basis of the entire state population as of the last census, which doesn't distinguish citizens and non-citizens. So areas with large non-naturalized immigrant populations effectively award more voting powers to their resident citizens to "represent" the rest of the district. And this practice was explicitly blessed as valid by the Supreme Court in Evenwel v. Abbott.
Many illegal immigrants do pay taxes. They can't get almost any job without an ITIN and paying taxes. Their employer needs an SSN or ITIN for the paperwork:
How did it go though? I've seen a large number of politically charged statements about it, but little actual fact (I've done some research, and would appreciate a competent citation)
Germany originally planned to bring Turkish guest workers for two years at a time on a non-immigration basis. Maintaining that temporary status proved impossible. In the oughts, Germany had to change its naturalization laws to provide a mechanism for permanent residency and citizenship. But decades of living as second-class non-citizens resulted in lack of assimilation: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/turkish-immigrat....
(The integration part is a touchy subject in Germany. My point more directed at the idea that you can have a country with a permanent class of non-citizen immigrant workers. You probably cannot do that in a liberal Western democracy.)
I lived in Germany for a few months so I got to have a few conversations. Most of their transport network was built by Turkish men that were imported. That's why Turkish street food is everywhere. They also were not able to bring their families as migrant workers but I think lots slowly migrated in the late 80s to early 00s.
They also have had issues with "assimilation" for every ethnic culture but lately MENA has caused a divide. It resulted in them limiting their intake. You can read a lot about it via the recent refugee crisis. There were stories of gangs of migrants roaming the streets, I only heard about a case of rape but there might be more. I don't think its right to throw everyone together in the clump referenced. However, from talking with folks there — their collective German culture and German ways of doing things is very important to them. If you don't act or think German you certainly are an outsider. I also never got the vibe it was ever a skin color thing, but it is a language and cultural assimilation thing.
Right, what I'm suggesting is that in a "globalized" world with free movement birth right Citizenship no longer makes much sense - if it did in the first place.
The United States for the first century or so had open immigration, but citizenship was restricted to "free white person(s)" of good character. The distinction between citizen and resident is therefore quite old, but originally open immigration was simply taken for granted. Immigration police didn't exist, nor police generally. So on the one hand, there wasn't even a hope of enforcing an immigration law, there also wasn't much in the way of government services. We've always had a distinction, but it was originally pretty arbitrary, racially biased, and mostly irrelevant, and the context has entirely changed. I'm not sure what conclusions may be drawn from that.
There's a lot more to that problem than mere political vote flipping or blue waves.
Importing Latin American politics by way of culture would be a terrifying disaster. There is hardly a place on earth with less stable government systems or human rights protections.
Transparency International ranks Latin America as the worst place on earth for corruption, only rivaled by a few parts of third world Africa.
Latin America is the most violent and corrupt large region on earth. People that think the US has a high murder rate, have never been anywhere near a typical Latin American country. The US has a non-murder violence rate comparable to developed Europe; Latin America's rate of non-murder violence is comparable to a war zone (and its rate of murder is best described as a war zone).
London's explosion of acid attacks, stabbing murders, and extreme violence problems are a crystal clear example of how you have to be very careful when you import foreign culture. Cultural adjustment & acclimation is very difficult and takes a long time.
Very few countries in Latin America function at all. They roll from one civil war, dictatorship and disaster to the next. The reason for that is cultural (and no, trying to blame the US for every problem in Latin America doesn't actually work as an excuse; unless you're going to credit the US for Canada's success and any successes in Latin America as well).
If the US is going to import a vast number of people from Latin America, it's also very important to not import the failed cultures of Latin America that have led to extreme murder rates, extreme poverty, extreme violence, and endless failed political systems.
Latin American Socialism is one of the great political and cultural failures of the last two centuries. It needs to die in Latin America, the sooner the better. Turning the US into a Venezuela, Bolivia or Brazil through cultural import is the worst possible outcome.
I am open to your theory that the US hasn’t had a significant influence on Latin American corruption...
But I’d need more than a base assertion... can you address specifically the theory that the U.S. has deliberately propped up corrupt governments sympathetic to US corporations to the exclusion of democratically elected ones?
I love this idea. I think it should be applied to all jurisdictions in the US. If I move to another town or state my vote should count as 1/X increasing by 1/X per year until it's 1/1. I shouldn't have the opportunity to vote at a full 1/1 until I've assimilated to that locale. If I'm moving somewhere I presumably like the status quo there so much that I shouldn't have much need to change things.
Assuming my taxes are applied at an equal percentage. I pay thousands to the state of California and I just moved here. I have a right to my vote if the state has a right to my tax dollars.
All the H1-Bs working in California also pay thousands to it. They also pay taxes for federal social programs (social security etc) that they aren't even eligible for. Do they have a right to vote?
Having someone count as less than a full citizen for electoral purposes has some disturbing historical connotations. I think it’d be difficult to get past that.
I think tying it to time should work out ok though since the value would increase over time by doing nothing. Everyone wants newcomers to have less say. At the federal level your vote would always be 1/1. As far as historical connotations go, that's for representation in congress, those people couldn't vote.
This would be a very shitty world to live in unless you were very rich.
It's efficient because it reduces the bargining power of labour to nothing, and those that gain are the owners of capital. With no bargining power, benefits will disappear and everyone will be non permanent except those in very secure positions or in very specialist jobs.
People will no longer have a home - a place to belong, they'll either break up families with parents working on other countries, or children will endure an existence of jumping from place to place eroding the chance for normal development.
Society will be broken and the ability to self organise to build political movements will evaporate.
This will not be a nice world to live in for 99.9pc of the population.
I'm not entirely sold on the idea of cramming the vast majority of the world's population into the subset of countries that are relatively wealthy and well-run. In practice, the cramming continues within those countries into the most favoured cities.
If we are thinking of pie-in-the-sky ideas like open borders, then why also try to think of a way to spread good government and wealth across all parts of the world?
I.e., spread the best practices so they become universal.
Some ideas in the past, like Europe colonising and controlling much of the world, are obviously out of fashion today. Yet ironically many people have voted with their feet (or would like to, if given the opportunity) and moved to Europe.
Yes, I've often thought we can't all live in North America* but we could all live like Americans if the freedom loving peoples of the world were given a chance to import the better parts of our culture. E.g., what if the Mexicans who thought that becoming an American would be better than remaining Mexican all moved to northern Mexico, seceded and tried to live like they were the 51st state. They could adopting the U.S. Constitution, etc. and make friendly overtures. Even if the U.S. didn't annex them they could probably pull favorable trade status and military alliances while retaining local self-government.
*This is a little melodramatic but it gives one a good sense of the scale of the problem with trying to bring everyone to western countries: https://youtu.be/KCcFNL7EmwY
I like the idea of open borders, guaranteed basic income (only for citizens), getting rid of income taxes, making all citizens pay a national sales tax instead (gbi would offset some of this), having a national id (with id you save 10-15% on sales tax without you pay a lot more, say 4-5% for citizens, 15-20% for migrants/travelers from abroad). -- This would make immigrants legal or not pay 3x the taxes, and I think a lot more people would be fine with that.
Sales tax would be more of a consumption/outbound tax -- all outbound expenses would be taxed if you buy or pay anyone it's taxed on payers side. So example a company pays wages they pay a sales tax on the wage, they buy office supplies, pay dividend to shareholders, pay ceo a bonus or golden parachute, buy land, etc... People would be taxed for paying rent, buying food, buying houses, buying land, etc.. on the purchase/exchange of money.
GBI would paid out to all citizens and sales tax could be adjusted yearly to balance the budget if there's a surplus/deficit from previous year.
Welfare/IRS can be dismantled completely and everything automated via technology. Saving billions. We'd need a lot less accountants, and tax workers. Tax software for consumers wouldn't be needed, etc.. It'd shore up a glut of industry we don't need.
As an immigrant I feel sufficiently discriminated against already: pay the same tax rates as anybody else, but ineligible for various government benefits and unable to vote. All because of a technicality: I don't have a parent born in the country I live in.
But you'd never have to fear being kicked out or deported, I think that would be better at this juncture in history than having a higher tax rate.
GOP'ers claim they hate immigrants because they don't pay their fair share, or will take their jobs. If they paid more than their share of taxes then it would get rid of that entire argument, and is the basis for my idea.
There could be tiers perhaps.. Citizen, ALmost a Citizen, Visiting w/ Work Visa temporarily, No documentation. W/ the last segment having the highest tax bracket. I mean no offense, but you'd then just need to choose does living in America = worth it by paying the extra taxes. At least you wouldn't be pushed out..
Maybe they could have another level Not-citizen but has voting privileges (of course that might come with a higher tax bracket in exchange for the privilege to vote..this would be up for debate obviously... ).
How would you collect sales tax without an IRS, and wouldn't a GBI that's high enough to live on cost a fortune? Tax rates may need to be higher than you suggest.
Businesses would pay sales tax, using the same local systems they use now to pay their local sales tax. The sales tax system would then split out what belongs to local govs and which to federal and divvy it out equally. Then we'd expand the sales tax reqs to other areas/expenditures that it normally doesn't apply like wages, dividends, land/home purchases, etc.
GBI wouldn't cost a fortune, if we get rid of existing handout programs, and streamline a lot of systems, also having a sales tax that we could alternate yearly to easily keep money 'balanced' would help with rolling out new features and testing scenarios to make sure we can afford something like gbi or universal healthare.
A lot of the systems can be automated, IRS does a lot of audits on citizens to make sure they're paying income taxes - we wouldn't do that anymore, we might still need a small agency to enforce that businesses are all in compliance, or that could just be on local/states to figure out.
The fact that there's no tax rebates/refunds would mean everyone pays taxes including the formerly in poverty now collecting GBI. GBI would essentially be their reimbursement/help. But it makes everyone a contributing actor, and if we need to raise sales tax to 15% before we can afford reasonable GBI, that makes sure everyone has a roof over their head, then it would still be worth it.
I think from a technical standpoint we also need to cut/streamline government in a lot of places. Healthcare, omnibuses, etc.. One thing I'd like is a github like format for bills, where you commit smaller bills, that are repealable, so big huge omnibuses are outlawed. It doesn't make sense that to get one small piece you as a senator want you have to vote for 10 pieces you don't want. Everything needs to be in smaller pieces so if something works we can keep it, if it fails we can revert the change like we would a bad commit on git.
The problem is the systems we use all require thousands of people to run, when they don't really have to, we could automate tons of stuff in the government but we don't because of all the jobs that would be lost. W/ gbi that wouldn't be a concern. I can't wait for robots/ai to take away 50%+ of jobs over the next decade freeing up mankind for more creative endeavors.
I'd love to see more interest in experimenting with alternative economic models. I could also come up with at least one. I'm not sure how this is ever going to happen though, given the politics of the world we live in now.
If I were myself rich, and able to hire a dev team, I'd build a global full-proof identity system (iris scanning maybe?) to guarantee identity 1:1, and a crypto coin with guaranteed basic income built in.
Then I'd build a not-for-profit grocery chain/and other businesses, where all fiat/crypto go back evenly to users of the coin. I'd buy up homes rent them below market rent values to try and drive rents back down instead of up.
Grocery stores would sell products cheaper, and profits would be split between gbi coin holders who live in that area, and workers at the local businesses we run. Execs at all companies we build would be capped at 100x worker salary. They'd also be not-for-profit (opposed to non-profit), meaning ALL money has to be paid at end of fiscal year to improvements of business, or to wages/bonuses/charity/etc.
I don't have faith in government to be the change we need, we're going to need to think outside the box and create self-sustaining government agnostic solutions.
When they get their own household, they can start collecting gbi, by then hopefully they go to school, and start contributing to society. They will still be paying taxes though regardless, and their parents will still be paying immigrant level taxes, so they would've paid their fair share so their kids could have a better life, that extra income to taxes makes up for a lot.
Either way, doctors, lawyers, delivery drivers, truck drivers, and 40% of other jobs will go away, replaced by AI. So, something has to fill the void to make it so people don't riot. GBI is the only thing that could possibly do that, unless you have a better solution. Instead of saying 'that won't work' I'd like to see you say, that's not sustainable, how about we do 'this' instead and offer up a suggestion that will work.
So what's stopping poor trailer park whites (at least a significant portion of which have been poor for generations) to become "contributors to society"?
Why do you think illegal/undocumented migrants would do better than those supposedly born into privilege?
Why would they also do better than african americans or hispanics, who are already at least 2nd generation migrants (and most are probably much more "rooted" than that) and are still not doing so hot?
Both them and poor whites are at least native speakers and share the same culture with the majority of the country.
> by then hopefully they go to school, and start contributing to society.
That's a pretty big if. It also assumes a utopian world (or at least an utopian country) that is crime free and that by extension, ethnic criminal organizations also do not exist.
As this sort of thinking becomes more and more popular, I wonder how close to some kind of singularity we truly are. If the people of the world are really so eager to transform the planet into a single global monoculture, then some sort of technology-driven unification of all human consciousness can't be too far off. Me, I personally like a world of true diversity, where people of different physical regions are allowed to have unique local cultures.
Complete and total globalization of everything on the planet (and perhaps beyond) might be inevitable, but I don't trust the people who are trying to make it happen right now to have any common peoples' best interests in mind, because I'm not naive to human nature (plus I've read up on them).
> people of different physical regions are allowed to have unique local cultures.
Freedom of movement doesn't prevent anyone from choosing any culture that they see fit, though. No-one is "disallowing" anything. If cultures end up blending into one, it would be a natural, voluntary process. So why is it inherently bad? Because of the loss in diversity? But if we can't maintain diversity as a species without use of force (which is what restrictions on movement are - at some point you have to forcibly prevent people from moving to implement that), then it would seem that we don't consider it all that important.
> Me, I personally like a world of true diversity, where people of different physical regions are allowed to have unique local cultures.
I think free movement is likely to amplify culture, not mute it. Right now I have to go through tons of hoops to live in Taiwan. The culture is precisely my aesthetic. I've spent untold hours studying the language. There are lots of Taiwanese-culturally-minded Americans and Dutch and South Africans who don't feel at home in their birth culture. Making it a big hassle for them to live in a culture that reflects their values just smears out culturally-Taiwanese across those countries.
Surely the hoops you have to go through to live in Taiwan despite not being a native prevent the country from being overrun by people who are culturally incompatible with the local populace? It sucks you have to go through hoops and can't just fly there and move in tomorrow I guess, but in a world where you could do that, so could I, and I can't speak any Chinese or Taiwanese, I don't know anything about their culture, and my only connection to the country is an aunt who married into the family. What if a bunch of people like myself moved there suddenly for some random reason, and the local culture was essentially eradicated as we altered it to suit our desires? with global open borders, this sort of thing would happen constantly, all over the place, and with the advent of the Internet, most of culture would merge into even more of a ubiquitous monoculture than the world already is.
I suspect you underestimate how massively disruptive it is to move to another country, particularly one that doesn't speak any language that you speak. Maybe America would pick up a lot of random people, being huge and wealthy, but everywhere else, I would seriously doubt it would get this kind of drive-by immigration you imagine.
Do you have any evidence to back any of that up? Personally I'm seeing a lot of mass migration across the world--not all of it wanted by the citizens of the countries being migrated to--right now, even without globally open borders. Why would having globally open borders do anything but increase this rate?
It's also interesting that you think globally open borders would only affect the culture of America, but you're okay with that, presumably because whatever Americans consider to be their culture currently is meaningless in your eyes compared to the glorious no-nations-no-borders future world you envision, which conveniently has no negative consequences and is only a positive thing for everyone (except Americans who like their country and culture more or less the way it is now but eh tough luck for them I guess)
I am ok with selective immigration. But open borders is truly crazy idea at this point. If we open borders like suggested next thing we know will be - developed countries becoming like garbage dumps we see in other countries. There is a reason why some countires fall into downward spirals. If u get its people en mass without filters, you get that mentality too.
Why dont we experiment in smaller scale with liberal companies like facebook/google/microsoft opening its employment where anyone from anywhere can come and say i want to be employed here and goog/fb/msft have to take them in? Lets even throw in a restriction that person should be cs degree holder from anywhere in the world. Lets see how it goes.
Isnt that how the Facebook/Google/Msft works right now with visa sponsorship and their remote hiring/working policies?
My friend working for Google moved later to Paris, France because she could and is still working for Google in France, I think companies like Facebook (in Ireland and certain European countries) or Google (literally everywhere in Europe) or even IBM (IBM has quite a few major offices in Asia, not sure why) already practice open border policies as part of a much wider remote working policy and have people from different countries working in different countries (aka somebody Spanish working in US while someone from US working in Ireland for example).
If 10 million poor people with no employable skillsets move into Europe, they would be withdrawing vastly more from the tax pool than they would be putting into it. People who do not contribute to production would just move wherever the local government will give residents the most resources.
If, yes. All this is conditioned on your racism that tells you that all foreigners are uneducated (and uneducatable)/lazy/freeloaders.
In addition, all of the tax money paid out would immediately be spent by these alleged freeloaders on meeting their needs for food etc., so it would flow back to producers of useful stuff and a lot of it come back as taxes.
That's not a racist 'If'. There's a massive backlog of unskilled rejected immigrants from poor countries that would be way better off living on the US social system than the one in the country they originate from.
Immigrants aren't magic, the ones that want to leave the most to come to the US are the ones from countries with bad education systems and bad social safety nets. Why would someone leave a good social safety net for a worse one?
>In addition, all of the tax money paid out would immediately be spent by these alleged freeloaders on meeting their needs for food etc., so it would flow back to producers of useful stuff and a lot of it come back as taxes
Except for all of the loss incurred by the things they consume. The only thing that comes back in taxes is a fraction of the profit on whatever they consumed.
Unless someone is producing more economic value than they consume, they are a net loss on the whole economy. There is a limit to how many people like this an economy can support before it will collapse.
It's just another insurance market like any other. The premiums coming in (tax rev) have to be more than the payouts (safety nets).
Anyone making minimum wage isn't actually paying into safety nets. The massive backlog that would be allowed in with open borders are unskilled laborers that would be making minimum wage (or less illegally).
> Anyone making minimum wage isn't actually paying into safety nets.
Anyone making minimum wage isn't necessarily using the safety nets either (depending on those nets, and how much minimum wage is), so /shrug/.
More to the point, as the original article also points out, we have had this exact natural experiment in the EU with the recent eastward expansions. Almost all poor people in poor countries stayed where they were. The ones that did emigrate to work... do work.
According to EU law, while there is freedom of movement for work (or whatever other purpose, as long as you are self-sufficient), there is no freedom of movement that allows you to go to another EU country and live off benefits. The "flooded by immigrants who live off of benefits without ever having payed into the system" scenario is exluded by law, and this works in practice.
Other countries could easily copy this system while opening their borders.
One could argue that this was tried on a micro scale with the EU. While there is an argument to be made that it did bring some economic growth but nothing near as close to the growth advertised by the economist.
How would you feel about all states in the US instituting their own immigration controls? Would there be a negative effect on the US economy if moving from New Jersey to New York required lengthy visa applications and waits for green cards?
I've seen some video on YouTube that would suggest it also brought some negative unintended consequences with it. Some people believe that sort of thing should be included in an economic analysis, somewhat similarly to how some people advocate that environmental costs should be included in energy cost analysis.
One area's net immigration is another area's brain drain.
Look around your own country and ask if the movement to the richer areas has helped the areas the people come from, or the all the people that were there in the first place or even really those that did the moving.
We keep recreating the slums of 1840s Manchester with every cycle and still we never learn.
Never take open borders arguments from anybody with a lock on their front door. Free movement is essentially the privatisation of borders for the benefit of the rich. You can have a border if you can afford to purchase enough land, put a fence up and hire the heavies to keep the riffraff out. Everybody else gets to fight it out in the mud pool.
That's not what I'm say is it, and you present no actual argument against the analogy. Just an emotional reaction - a tell for cognitive dissonance.
The difference between open borders and visa control is simply this.
Do you believe that somebody should be able to walk into your house, sit down on the front sofa and demand Pringles, which you have to then provide.
Or do you believe that somebody should knock on your door first and ask if they can come in, you then invite them into the front room and offer them Pringles.
For the majority of poorer people whose outlook ties them to an area, not a profession, a country is seen as a sort of house share. And open borders fans are that annoying house mate who keeps bringing in new people without asking, and expecting everybody else to put up with them sleeping on the sofa.
I agree with you but evolution predicts globalization. Instead of moving backward, we have to figure out how to move forward.
The world will be a place where money is what guarantees safety. State welfare will be no more. No place is safe if it is free. Access to infrastructure will be open but cost money regardless of your citizenship.
If you think the future will be like that, you should stop paying taxes (as in contributing to the old model), move to a tax free jurisdiction and start saving funds (as in make sure you can live in a gated society).
The old model is collapsing (governments, countries, borders, citizenship) albeit slowly. Governments are getting more indebted and less efficient. Corps are making record gains. International trade is still thriving despite all. And the Internet is still here.
This article seems symptomatic of a general decline in the quality of The Economist. I used to be a subscriber but there was a noticeable sharp drop some time ago, I think when Micklethwaite stepped down as editor, and things seem to have got worse since. Shoddy thinking, bizarre arguments and extremist conclusions seem more common than they used to be.
Firstly, the core thesis of the argument is that merely by moving to a richer country, people become automatically more productive:
> Workers become far more productive when they move from a poor country to a rich one. Suddenly, they can join a labour market with ample capital, efficient firms and a predictable legal system. Those who used to scrape a living from the soil with a wooden hoe start driving tractors. Those who once made mud bricks by hand start working with cranes and mechanical diggers
This can only be described as some sort of fantasy. People who have spent their lives making mud bricks by hand don't suddenly become qualified crane operators by mere virtue of migrating to a developed country. They need the same training any native born person would, but they also need to learn the local language and customs too.
Indeed, a common effect of mass immigration is that mechanical diggers and cranes are less used, because why buy expensive automated machinery when labour is nearly free?
A clear counterpoint is the state of Germany. Over 1 million migrants from Africa and the ME let in with no border controls worth talking about. Did they all immediately become high earning crane operators. No. Aydan Özoğuz, commissioner for immigration, refugees and integration, told the Financial Times that only a quarter to a third of the newcomers would enter the labour market over the next five years, and “for many others we will need up to 10”.
The Institute for Employment Research (IAB) found only 45 per cent of Syrian refugees in Germany have a school-leaving certificate and 23 per cent a college degree.
Statistics from the Federal Labour Agency show the employment rate among refugees stands at just 17 per cent.
The Economist also seems to struggle with the basics of why some countries do better than others. They do sort of comprehend the shape of the problem:
> On the contrary, the reason why migration is so attractive is that some countries are well-run and others, abysmally so.
> It is very hard to transfer Canadian institutions to Cambodia, but quite straightforward for a Cambodian family to fly to Canada.
Hmmm. So. Some countries are run abysmally, and others are well run. Why is that? The Economist acts like good governance is a feature of geography, something the Canadians dig out of the ground. But it's not, government is people, so presumably the people in those countries aren't very good at building wealthy societies. For example their cultures frequently turn a blind eye to graft, dictatorship is common, installing relatives in government posts is expected, work gets done slowly or not at all, votes are seen as things useful to sell for a bit more income and so on.
So what happens if all those people simply move to another country? Does their culture change overnight? And if not, what makes The Economist so sure that the bad administration and poverty those people were trying to escape won't just follow them to the west?
This problem is not theoretical or simply scaremongering. The sad tale of Lutfur Rahman is a warning sign of what can go wrong when large numbers of people settle in the west from parts of the world where western values are not well established - they don't simply change overnight and instead western political systems start to look like third world countries too:
> The Economist acts like good governance is a feature of geography
Where did they say that? It's a common and well researched problem that institutions are not easily transplanted.
I am also not really sure what "government is people" is supposed to mean. Creating and maintaining institutions that produce wealth and stability is very difficult and dependent on many conditions like path dependencies and global embeddedness. In no case it was ever as easy as saying something like: Those people are just great institution builders!
Things like corruption aren't personal traits but rational under specific systemic environments.
See my comment below. It's a useful anecdote because the politician in question wasn't merely corrupt. He turned Tower Hamlets into an area with the same political problems of Bangladesh itself - possible because so many of the people who lived there were also from Bangladesh and were willing to e.g. act as enforcers, sell votes, exploit or be exploited by religious loyalties, take part in electoral fraud and so on.
By himself he couldn't have accomplished much, but with a large base of people for whom this sort of thing was culturally acceptable in that electoral ward, suddenly a part of London started to look politically much like a third world country.
>Firstly, the core thesis of the argument is that merely by moving to a richer country, people become automatically more productive:
>> Workers become far more productive when they move from a poor country to a rich one. Suddenly, they can join a labour market with ample capital, efficient firms and a predictable legal system. Those who used to scrape a living from the soil with a wooden hoe start driving tractors. Those who once made mud bricks by hand start working with cranes and mechanical diggers
>This can only be described as some sort of fantasy. People who have spent their lives making mud bricks by hand don't suddenly become qualified crane operators by mere virtue of migrating to a developed country. They need the same training any native born person would, but they also need to learn the local language and customs too.
Um, what? Of course they do. Capital is a complement to labor. Moving to a high-capital country means the fruits of your labor are multiplied because you can take advantage of that capital to increase your productivity.
>Indeed, a common effect of mass immigration is that mechanical diggers and cranes are less used, because why buy expensive automated machinery when labour is nearly free?
Labor is sometimes a substitute for capital, and we can observe this substitution at the margin as you describe. However, overall, capital is a complement to labor once scale effects are taken into account — as overall output increases after a right-shift in labor, demand for capital increases as well. This is the same effect behind why Luddism is wrong.
>A clear counterpoint is the state of Germany. Over 1 million migrants from Africa and the ME let in with no border controls worth talking about. Did they all immediately become high earning crane operators. No. Aydan Özoğuz, commissioner for immigration, refugees and integration, told the Financial Times that only a quarter to a third of the newcomers would enter the labour market over the next five years, and “for many others we will need up to 10”.
Refugees in Germany face significant regulatory obstacles to participating in the labor force.
>This problem is not theoretical or simply scaremongering. The sad tale of Lutfur Rahman is a warning sign of what can go wrong when large numbers of people settle in the west from parts of the world where western values are not well established - they don't simply change overnight and instead western political systems start to look like third world countries too:
An immigrant from a third world country was corrupt, therefore corruption is endemic to all immigrant populations because they don't know any better? Not touching this one.
Moving to a high-capital country means the fruits of your labor are multiplied because you can take advantage of that capital to increase your productivity.
In the world of perfectly-informed, perfectly-rational, perfectly-enlightenedly-self-interested frictionless spherical humans, maybe.
Here on Earth, companies move their operations out of high-capital countries on a regular basis.
Well written. Totally agreed. There is systematic underestimation of culture migration along with all its goods and bads in these articles. No one digs into why the country became what it is.
Have you ever considered that what you consider "western values" are in fact values that emerge in a society that lives in conditions where there is political stability and economic opportunity? That people's "culture" is affected by the environment around them as a general pattern?
Yes, I have considered that. It doesn't appear to be true.
If it was, cases like Rahman's would not have happened. After moving from Bangladesh as a young person, and becoming surrounded by political stability and economic opportunity, he would have adopted western values and become an ordinary politician. So would the people in Tower Hamlets, which has a very large Bangladeshi immigrant population.
In fact what happened was this:
• He engaged in massive election fraud, including buying votes, organising large numbers of faked votes, bribery, buying support of local Bangladeshi TV channels, intimidating witnesses and doubling council funding to local Bengali charities in return for their political support.
• He did this so successfully that he won a local election that was found (years later) so riven with corruption that it was declared by a judge to be entirely void and would have to be re-run from scratch.
• He also gained votes by telling Muslim voters that his political opponent was racist and that voting for him was an "Islamic duty".
• He was kicked out of the Labour party for having links with an extremist group.
• He benefited from a group of "enforcers", people attached to youth organisations funded by his council, who would visit and intimidate any Bangladeshi who spoke out against the mayor. This included threatening to burn down the houses of witnesses during the corruption trial.
• He has also been accused of extensive mortgage fraud and tax evasion.
Corruption, bribery, intimidation of voters, stuffing ballot boxes, buying political support, exploiting religion and race to gain support - these are all the sorts of behaviours strongly associated with third world countries like Bangladesh, but they showed up in the UK in the modern era too, even with people who moved as children.
If values were created by the environment, then this wouldn't happen (unless you consider the cultural effects of immigrants who pool together in the same areas to be able to overwhelm the cultural effects of the new host country).
Having interacted with immigrants from many different places, I find for a vast majority of them, the environment does in fact determine their culture. Are there a few for whom it doesn't? Sure. In the same way there are criminals even among people who grow up in such an environment.
I would love to visit this magical place you describe where ordinary politicians are the bedrock whence we judge the morality of the underlying society.
> Corruption, bribery, intimidation of voters, stuffing ballot boxes, buying political support, exploiting religion and race to gain support
Sounds like business as usual in Chicago...joking, of course I'm joking...
I've considered this and deemed it to be false. A great counter example is Imperial China around 1300-1400AD. They were fantastically wealthy and politically stable yet "western values" did not develop.
The unending spate of banking frauds, VW, Theranos, price fixing in the pharmaceutical sector, the opiod crisis, gerry mandering, widespread lobbying and political corruption seems to contradict your position.
To suggest corruption is a 'third world thing' and does not impact the western world seems to be disconnected from reality.
To talk about 'western values' in the same context is dangerously close to bigotry and jingoism.
That's a strawman - I never claimed there was no corruption in the west. The Economist claims there's much less in the west than elsewhere and this is in fact the core of the entire article - the assumption that with open borders globally, corruption as a drag on the global economy would shrivel because everyone would move to much less corrupt places. That's where they get the 78 trillion dollar figure from.
And it's also the Economist that ponders the problem of what happens if the immigrants vote in an Islamist government (their solution: immigrants may never be allowed to vote, i.e. taxation without representation on a massive scale, which is hardly a western value).
Also, I'm not sure Theranos is a case of corruption. Seems more like a delusional founder who got in too deep and was eventually discovered and dealt with through the sorts of mechanisms (the free press, medical regulation) that is usually under the umbrella of "western values".
of course there is corruption in the west, the west is not immune from human nature. the west is really not different than any other country, it just has a "strong" economy and pretends it is the standard and a really effective "narrative", everyone else "unquestioning" believes in this one measurement ruler to rule them all mentality and buys the products it sells. it is quite simple. west and east, are the same, just a unreal division so they can make you choose sides and not pay too much attention to other things.
ahh yes, open the borders and import every type of third worlder into western countries for the sake of profiting over cheap labor... Let us forget about the clash in cultures, and how unrestricted immigration leaves the native population in a worse off state by rising housing prices, demographic replacement and stagnant wages. I have experienced first hand the effects of such policies here in California. This article is the equivalent of selling your lung to afford a kidney.
Also as a side note, Why is it that more developed nations have to find solutions for failed states by re-homing the population which voted for those same policies instead of leaving them to fight and improve the conditions in their own countries. Absolute globalist non sense.
> Why is it that more developed nations have to find solutions for failed states by re-homing the population which voted for those same policies instead of leaving them to fight and improve the conditions in their own countries.
Because developed nations have a vested interest in keeping international peace where possible as it is good for trade and national security.
You’re also assuming every country is a fair democracy, and that they can resolve issues without international support.
Remember that every developed country (including your own) has only been able to develop by leveraging cheaper labour and goods from 3rd world countries over the past 300 years, we are all very closely linked, whether you like it or not.
This article (and the comments) seem to focus on migration from poorer to more developed areas.
But what if people could migrate from the developed world to resource rich regions (like Africa and South America) and have the chance to unlock the potential of those regions? All that potential wealth which is currently held back by corrupt governments and non-progressive cultural habits could be unlocked.
Wait, that happened before and was called colonialism and wasn't good for the natives. But neither is uncontrolled inflow of third worlders into industrialized nations. Is growing global wealth more important than effects on local populations?
Well i hear sometimes that india was better off under imperial rule than now. There was better rule of law. I guess india should have waited another 50-100 years for independence.
This article was kind of a roller coaster for me, I was like "no screw that, that'll screw all sorts of things up" then it had all these fairly reasonable proposals for minimizing the impacts and I was ok with it.
>This, they fear, would make life worse, and perhaps threaten the political system that made their country worth moving to in the first place.
The latter part of that sentence is of key importance. Ask the people of Denver what they think of migrants from CA, ask Mainers what they think of the Massholes and the way those groups have affected their society (comically, most Mainers would rather have more poor Somalis than MA migrants). It's really easy to say "well it wasn't that bad" as an outsider 50yr or 100yr after the fact but for the people who have to live through it these changes really suck.
>for five years, ten years or even a lifetime. This may seem harsh, but it is far kinder than not letting them in.
I support this so, so, so, much. So many cultural problems caused by migration would be solved if when moving somewhere your vote counted as 1/X and increased to 1/1 over some period of time. This should apply to citizens too. If I move to the next town over my vote should count at 1/X in town elections but still count as what it previously did in state/federal elections
As an aside, I thought this was going to be a piece about the cost to the economy of transportation and physical distance but I was disappointed.
The reason why Mexican immigrants make more money as mentioned in the article in the US would be erased under open borders. It would be a race to the bottom, globally.
Would you prefer to work a month to be able to afford a shirt, like it was just a few centuries before? Or do you prefer when "race to the bottom" made the cost of the same shirt into a few hours of work?
It’s not though. I’m feeling the effects of these policies right now! I’m not up for whites being pushed out so that others are allowed to arrive and bleed us dry. You want to contribute? Fine, no problem, but you can’t come and wreck the place and then move on.
A global race to the bottom is what the Economist, and its owners the Rothschilds, want. An atomized replaceable-cog society made up on indistinguishable consumer units.
I'm amazed that the name "Rothschild" still has the power to stir up conspiracy theories in 2018.
Rothschild holds only a small minority stake in The Economist.
I think it's less that this article wants to create a race to the bottom, and more that you fear the idea of the 1st world life you lucked into by birth being disrupted by a large influx of poor people who weren't so lucky in the birth lottery.
Jeez these new Nike's I have on are super comfortable.
Did the Rothschilds go bankrupt, and lose all their money, or something?
They (the family collectively, or the family trust, however you wish to address their finances) were billionaires by the 1850s, at the latest.
"On July 18, 1815, a courier working for Rothschild informed the English government that Napoleon appeared to be suffering defeat at Waterloo... Rothschild began selling all of his bonds, encouraging rumors that Napoleon had won and that English government paper would soon be worthless. Due to Rothschild's reputation as an influential and respected investor, the panicked English public followed his lead. The mass selling resulted in a total collapse of the English stock exchange.
"It was then that Rothschild's agents began snatching up bonds and stock at record-low prices. Two days later, when Wellington's envoy confirmed that Napoleon Bonaparte had indeed suffered a crushing defeat, Nathan Rothschild was effectively in control of the English stock exchange. As of 2015, the English government was still paying back money owed to the Rothschild family from this Napoleonic maneuver."
I don't believe in your (and the Economist's) false dilemma that my 1st world has to suck and I have to work for slave wages in order for people in the 3rd world to have better lives.
> you fear the idea of the 1st world life you lucked into by birth being disrupted by a large influx of poor people who weren't so lucky in the birth lottery.
"Workers become far more productive when they move from a poor country to a rich one. Suddenly, they can join a labour market with ample capital, efficient firms and a predictable legal system. Those who used to scrape a living from the soil with a wooden hoe start driving tractors. Those who once made mud bricks by hand start working with cranes and mechanical diggers. Those who cut hair find richer clients who tip better."
Like hell they do.
In the first two scenarios, the hypothetical worker is almost certainly not qualified to be operating any sort of heavy machinery. In the third, stylists/barbers tend to require certification.
I'm sure this paragraph wasn't meant to be taken literally, but it does nonetheless betray a gross underestimation of the costs of actually training someone to be an effective and safe worker in a new, more technologically-driven environment.
One thing open borders would completely destroy would be the social safety net of many countries. Let’s say there is completely open borders between Sweden and the United States. Sweden has high taxes and an significant social safety net. The United States has low taxes and a non-existent safety net. Over time, people who pay a lot of taxes migrate from Sweden to the United States. People from the United States who are unable to work for whatever reason, migrate to Sweden.
This would also affect government. You either end up with a large underclass that doesn’t have voting rights (see Qatar for example) or else they have voting rights and the laws of the receiving country change to reflect the culture of the immigrants.
Taxes would likely change from income taxes to consumption and property taxes, so it’s unlikely that governments will go bankrupt. More attractive areas of the world will cost more to live in, but it would eventually turn into one large country with pockets of exclusive communities.
$78T for 8G humans are roughly $10,000 per person.
If this is per month then its an interesting idea.
But if this is per year then there is no incentive for the Western citizens to open their borders. Average income is about $30,000 per year right now. If the job market is flooded with workers then there is no way that people will keep on earning that much. Additionally, the housing market will explode and people who rent their homes will have to move.
I wouldn't be surprised if opening all borders would lead to even bigger gains. After all, China's source of income is their huge pool of workers. But I don't think that $78T profits are a good argument to convince the West to open its borders.
The housing market would be fine if people were allowed to build housing on their own land without an extremely expensive and onerous zoning process driven by those with a vested interest in expensive housing.
What if instead of open borders, there were no borders.
What if the entire world (democratic regions at least) sign some sort of pact, each city-state gets 1 vote. Each state is taxed x amount to preserve an international military force that's goal is to thwart axis-type powers that might arise, but needs a 60%+ vote from city states.
Maybe an ai of some sort could decide the size/scope of region that equates to fair city-states. -- Travel between cities/states would be open as long as you don't mean harm to the area. Cities/states could set their own solutions to problems like healthcare, drugs, basic income, jobs, etc...
I think large governments like USA/Canada/EU/China create represive regimes, smaller self-governed entities could run things better locally, and still have open communications/trade/etc with nearby states/cities. It would also be less-prone to corruption as you'd need to pay thousands more politicians (ones in each locality) instead of just in D.C.
Personally, I'd love to start a blockchain/identity project to create a universal basic income with fool-proof/sybil-attack proof identity system, making fiat currencies un-needed and creating one-world blockchain-based currency, that helps alleviate pain caused by automation. I think a monetary system like this could take away some of the power and corruption from government.
At least they use "Potentially" in the subtitle, sheesh.
"If we had open borders we'd be $X trillion richer" is silly. It makes the huge assumption that institutions would stay the same, or inexplicably trend better everywhere, instead of worse. There is no thesis for why this is so, it is hand-waved here.
> Suddenly, they can join a labour market with ample capital, efficient firms and a predictable legal system.
This should prompt some navel gazing about:
* Why some countries succeed in building institutions and what is different about them.
* Why some countries used to have good institutions and now have dysfunctional ones. (Like say, Argentina, Lebanon, etc)
They might even learn something about why free movement isn't common.
> A Nigerian in the United States cannot be enslaved by the Islamists of Boko Haram.
The author has almost figured it out.
> If lots of people migrated from war-torn Syria, gangster-plagued Guatemala or chaotic Congo, would they bring mayhem with them? It is an understandable fear (and one that anti-immigrant politicians play on), but there is little besides conjecture and anecdotal evidence to support it.
Okay, he hasn't quite.
The planet is awash with dysfunctional institutions clawing away at function and semi-functional ones. Just going off of his Boko Haram example, the South Thailand Islamic insurgency is 13 years and counting of fighting from Muslim separatists. The Myanmar Islamic insurgency has been going on for 70 years and counting. The Somali civil war has been ongoing for my whole life, the Nigerian insurgencies over the years are numerous and ongoing, boko is just a continuation. I'm sure you know the story of other countries, weary reader.
So why isn't the thesis "A world of free movement would spawn a new era of separatists"? Crazy, yes, but at least we have some precedent for it as a nonsense headline.
No discussion of why nations differ in institutional quality is one thing, but no explanation of why the good-institution countries wouldn't degrade is another. As Taleb says, Economists don't seem to understand things that move.
~~~
A little tangential, but one of the things I think is under-discussed, is what happens to the places where people mass migrate from.
Other countries, like Lebanon after its civil war, are similar. Syria might end up similarly, I don't know.
It is hard to fault people moving en masse for a better life, but it further solidifies that the places they leave behind will continue to be governed by the looney bin for the decades to come. I wish there was a more thinking about solutions to this problem, and less glee at the capital class counting chips over the obverse.
> Why some countries used to have good institutions and now have dysfunctional ones. (Like say, Argentina, Lebanon, etc)
I believe the answer for Argentina is "right-wing US support of right-wing death squads because of a fear of communism" and for Lebanon is "The pro-Western president of Lebanon requested American military intervention against internal opposition, which the US was happy to do because of a fear of communism", right?
This is a idealistic thought experiment, but Europe is still reeling from the the Syrian refugee crisis and that is just one small country. Throwing open boarders when there’s differential welfare systems would be chaos. The world wouldn’t be $78T richer, it would be $78T poorer because it would lead to widespread civil war. Even if the author was right about the economic impacts she is discounting people’s tolerance for change, especially is a country’s conservative faction. For developed nations it would effectively be asking for forfiteture.
The author uses Greece as an example, but Greece has nowhere the poverty of much of the developing world (and that’s a big number).
What incentive is there for the average middle class American to partake in such a grand experiment? Look at what happened when you introduced scarcity to an educated and industrious population after WW1. Mass genocide.
And let’s not forget housing inflation in developed countries. Immigrants are not going to head to Reno, they’re going to go to cities like NY, SF, LA, London—cities that they’ve heard about and where there are already large immigrant communities. Good luck adding another million people to NY over a three year period.
"The world wouldn’t be $78T richer, it would be $78T poorer because it would lead to widespread civil war"
Nope, 90% of people would stay where they are. Most people don't like migrating: to uproot yourself and your family from the land, culture and language you love is a big deal and people only do it when the have no other choice.
Okay and what about the migration of the other 700m people with most frequent destinations being US and Europe from the bottom quartile of countries by GDP?
Mexico has 125m people and the US has around 12m illegal aliens. Let’s generously assume that only half are from Mexico, that’s 5% of the population that was willing to take the risk to live in the US illegally. Now create an open boarder? You’d have 10% of Mexico moving to the US tomorrow. It’s human nature to want a better life and it’s also human nature to want to protect the life one already has.
Borders are, & have always been, fundamentally open, because it's a plain physical (biological) reality that H. sapiens is a resourceful, migratory species. Erection of walls and legions of petty border-guarding popinjays is no more than a can-kicking exercise, a waste of time & resources analogous to those squandered pretending that climate change requires little response. You either face physical reality, or exert tremendous material effort on crass denial. Story-based entities (cultures, businesses, nations) are necessary but in the end, they are only temporary tactical fictions. They supervene on physical reality and when they attempt to deny it, will be swept away.
These are the same geniuses that were cheerleading financial deregulation before the crash. Before that, they were cheering liberalization of international capital flows before the asian crash. After, they were cheering austerity.
Hate to say it but if you suddenly open borders you will have a huge immigration crisis. Half the planet would literally move to western europe and north america.
Maybe open border can work for trade and business related immigration with sponsors on either side.
I doubt it even works for trade. Full free trade has caused money flow to 3rd world countries at the cost of natives. China has policy of trading off ip for privilege of cheap manufacturing. So its growing in tech at the cost of west. What west gets in return in temporary cheap goods and must of 2$ crap toys which break.
Okay, take the people the OP is talking about, with spouse and children. Then look at their qualifications for work in the US. Look at their skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic, knowledge of English, US civics, etc. Some of the immigrants need training in bathing, using a toilet, and other basic hygiene. And there tend to be serious medical, including communicable disease, problems -- TB, measles, polio, GI parasites, etc. And look at job skills -- computer usage, basics of electricity in factories and on job sites, skills with important work place tools, etc.
The US has long had immigration criteria that ruled out such people.
Okay, now take a US citizen that on qualifications is a good match for such an immigrant and see what their job and career prospects are. As we know very, very well, they are unemployable or nearly so. Well, so will be the immigrant. The ability of the immigrant to get a job, have a career, and support themselves and their family is from poor to zero.
So, why do such immigrants want to come to the US? And how can they hope to make it?
First, the usual way has been the immigrants were young men who left their families, friends, villages behind and did common labor, e.g., picking fruit. They lived several to a room sleeping on a mat on the floor. They were here only the warmer parts of the year, not through the winters. They got paid in US cash with no deductions for taxes or US Social Security. Then at least for the winter, they went home and took their US cash with them. Due to currency value differences, their US cash would go really far back in their home village. Of course, that whole situation is wildly illegal, on taxes and more. A US citizen here for 12 months a year can't do that and support a family or even themselves.
Second, if the immigrant brings their family, with children, then the family and especially the children are one heck of a huge expense for the US education and welfare systems, paid for by US workers paying taxes.
More broadly the OP does poor accounting: Sure, there are a lot of people in the world who are, in US terms, not very productive. Some of these people are current US citizens, and the US is struggling to get those people trained, into jobs, and productive. The US has many dozens of job training programs. Those candidate immigrants are on average less well qualified than the millions of current US citizens struggling to be productive in the US economy. Where do the OP authors get the funny stuff they've been smoking to conclude that immigrants much less well qualified than millions of US citizens who are already struggling to get good jobs in the US will do better than those already struggling US citizens?
Or, if those immigrants are such a valuable, neglected resource, then, sure, take some US tools, supplies, know-how, etc. to some foreign countries and give the people there jobs. Chrysler tried that in Mexico and has decided that it was a mistake and are returning to Detroit.
Uh, apparently to make people as productive as in the US takes more than just some people and training for a job; also required are huge investments in infrastructure from water and sewer, roads and bridges, suppliers and supplies, communications, regulations, laws, law enforcement, public health, medical care, citizenship, ..., the whole thing. The OP is being simplistic, straining over gnats and forgetting elephants.
IMHO, too many powerful people in US business see the immigrants as a new version of slave labor. In 1861, the US had a lot of slave labor and people who liked that situation; we fought a bloody war over that issue, killed IIRC 600,000+ US soldiers and maybe a comparable number of other US citizens. Net, slavery was a big mistake. Bringing back slavery will be a bigger mistake. The forces in favor of slavery have been strong for thousands of years and did not end in 1865 or so.
If the authors of the OP want to take some funds, rush to some country with lots of really poor people that are unproductive, set up some businesses, give those people jobs, training, etc., so be it. People have been trying that off and on around the world for a long time. We've long had international organizations for such development. Successes have not been anything like the claims of tens of trillions of dollars claimed in the OP.
So, the OP looks like really bad, simple economic and business arithmetic, so bad the OP does not look like economics. So, what really is the OP? Hmm .... For a candidate answer, consider the advice "Always look for the hidden agenda.".
Closed borders is a form of discrimination. But if we open them and want to maintain our standard of living we'll have to make them second class citizens.
As the article argues, this is better than excluding them from our labour market.
But discrimination like designating people as 2nd class citizens is probably more repundant to people's sense of ethics than closed borders.
And perhaps these moral tabu's are not without importance. I'm not sure, but "closed borders" do seem worse than a 2nd class of citizens.
Globalists only think in terms of profit and not of culture, tradition and the mental well-being of the average person. There are plenty of studies which show that homogeneous societies are happier, more trusting and more engaged in the political system as well as their fellow man.
Reducing people down to a line in a calculation of your bottom line is dehumanising.
after visiting 52 countries i came to the same conclusion, it is not like we are not implicitly sharing the space and all our physical objects with everyone else by proxy of the same space encapsulating them and their presence on one planet, nobody is taking their own personal lawnmower off the planet just yet... we are so indoctrinated that we fail to see that at the physical level everything is shared and everything is recycled if you look at the lifetime of any object. however in a system which has gateways at every speedbump the potential for a few actors to make big profits is so high that they resist anything else...
I don't know if I follow. Are you saying you've travelled to 52 different countries and found that they all exist on the same planet populated by a species devoid of interplanetary travel and that they have set up a system of artificial geographical barriers to control the distribution resources and movement of individuals of the species?
I think they are trying to say we’re all basically the same across all countries, and all of these lines, boundaries and definitions are arbitrarily drawn by others in order to profit off our evolutionary tendency to work together as groups.
This seems to indicate that the borders themselves are an intensional form of profiteering. I see this more as the incremental and accidental process that takes advantage of the peculiarities of geography.
Free movement will drive down wages and labor costs. Labor will lose value while capital will increase in value.
Combine this dynamic with our current world in which the gulf between a small elite class and everyone else is widening with the middle class in between deteriorating, and you have a recipe for disaster. The modern welfare state that exists in Europe and to a (much) lesser extent in the US would crumble from the stress of millions of new individuals flooding the economy at the low end and being stuck there because of economic dynamics beyond anyone's control.
Rather than importing the impoverished from poor nations to rich nations, we should be working together as a community of nations to establish law and order where there is lawlessness. Once law, order and in particular property rights are followed and enforced, wealth can and will grow as it has in places like China and Vietnam.
Encouraging freedom of movement will result in poor regions becoming even more destitute. As one of my wealthy friends from Pakistan lamented to me once when considering whether she should move to Canada or stay in Pakistan, "if people like myself flee Pakistan, who will stay to build it into a strong and prosperous nation?"
Overall, free movement would be a terrible idea for most people. This article does a really poor job of considering the issue.
The economist spouting salon-leftist nonsense again.
Today it isn't "workers of all nations unite", it is "1% of all nations unite in order to ensure free flow of capital and members of the industrial reserve army".
I'm not a marxist, I'm pro capitalism/monetarism within culturally defined borders.
I used to be subscribe to the Economist until it became clear that is has transformed itself into the propaganda machine of the financial elite.
It is owned by the Roschilds and every single day looks more despaired and afraid of the current economic situation. They want to shoehorn their rich owners solutions to the crisis so they remain unscathed in their wealth, while the rest of the population loses most of it.
One of the most craziest thing those rich guys are doing is financing with hundreds of millions of euros the immigration of Africans into Europe, like the 60 million euro Soros gave to a "humanitarian society" that does most of the travel form Africa to Europe.
There are more things in life than money, like culture, and people are starting to strongly react to the ipositions of those rich elites, Brexit and Trump are consecuences, but they are just the start.
There is a huge debt in the world that will be never paid, and the capital destruction that is coming is not going to be pretty.
The immediate goal of everyone in this country should be to open the borders and open trade.
There is no excuse.
Borders serve no useful purpose in a globalized economy. Can you imagine how terrible it would be if the states had hard borders between them?
People act like having open borders mean invading marauders of foreigners, but did everyone from Ohio invade Maryland because of the open borders the states have? In reality, most people would stay where their family and relatives are.
"My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, sometime in the future with energy that's as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere." - Hillary Clinton
Let's start by making annexing the states of Canada and Mexico into the US, and work other countries from there.
You know we tried this during the Mexican-American war. It turns out the Mexicans are still pretty sore about this.
If borders were a purely economic construct I might agree with you. However, they aren't, not even primarily. Remove modern notions of economics, look into deep history, and borders still exist.
As for Mrs. Clinton, she dreamed she could be President twice. We all know how that worked out for her and unfortunately us.
Borders serve a purpose. As a matter of fact people from Southern America (for example) hold other educational backgrounds, belief systems and an overall different attitude than people from the North. While we all are humans and we all should treat each other with respect we shouldn't forget that we all are different. In some cases we are more compatible to each other in some we aren't. Someday we might have a world without borders, but that isn't until we have solved education, wealth and access to those for the whole planet.
> People act like having open borders mean invading marauders of foreigners, but did everyone from Ohio invade Maryland because of the open borders the states have?
Because Ohio and Maryland are not that different. However El Salvador and the U.S. are and it might lead to huge problems (like the U.S. already has)
Also as you like Hillary Quotes so much: "Can't we just drone this guy" - Hillary Clinton on Julian Assange
Interesting. Let put this into action. How about you try to hitchhike across western europe or japan and document your experences. Then try to hitchhike across the middle east or subsaharan africa. Let me know how that one goes for you. I hope you don't encounter any differences.
> I live in literally the most diverse area of the US, and no, people from South America and Ohio really aren't different at all.
Maybe you should leave your echo chamber every once in a while. I also live in the most diverse area of my nation, and while it is all fun and games when I am around well educated, well mannered people from different countries it is less fun when I have to cross the street in a diverse area with less high educational standards. The former by the way are already eligible to cross the border at any time (because they are legally able to obtain a visa) the latter aren't and really shouldn't.
That said, the cultural differences in the Americas might be less grave than Europe and the Middle East, or the U.S. and the Middle East for example. It really boils down to religion and education (in most cases), both of which are pretty similar in the Americas.
People could (and probably would) still live in communities with common cultural and religious ties, even in a world without national borders. And, in this world of international borders, people from disparate backgrounds manage to immigrate and integrate just fine.
National boundaries don't really map to the borders of cultural and religious identity (as can be readily seen in the Middle East), so your argument here (which seems to be that the former is needed to preserve the latter) doesn't seem well supported.
> National boundaries don't really map to the borders of cultural and religious identity (as can be readily seen in the Middle East), so your argument here [..] doesn't seem well supported.
That is because we already let immigration happen. And it supports my thesis really well, as this immigration lead to severe problems amongst groups of different cultural backgrounds.
> People could (and probably would) still live in communities with common cultural and religious ties, even in a world without national borders.And, in this world of international borders, people from disparate backgrounds manage to immigrate and integrate just fine.
Those groups living clustered together isn't integration but segregation.
>That is because we already let immigration happen
It's also because national boundaries tend to be more about resource allocation and political necessity than the preservation of culture or religion. Look at the problems caused by the British Empire carving up the Middle East after World War 1.
Now perhaps you might argue the national borders there should correspond more to local tribal and cultural identity (and maybe they should) but the point is they don't, and they rarely do anywhere.
>And it supports my thesis really well, as this immigration lead to severe problems amongst groups of different cultural backgrounds.
At one time, Americans felt that Irish and Chinese immigrants could never properly integrate... to say nothing about free Africans. Yet all of those groups have been unambiguously integrated.
I work around Indian and Middle Eastern immigrants. Hindus and Muslims. It's remarkable how unremarkable they are given how incompatible "Western culture" is supposed to be to them. There aren't always "severe problems" with immigrants from different cultural backgrounds. Sometimes there are, yes, but it isn't a rule of nature.
>Those groups living clustered together isn't integration but segregation.
Those aren't boolean states. Someone can maintain a connection to their heritage while still being a part of greater society.
> At one time, Americans felt that Irish and Chinese immigrants could never properly integrate... to say nothing about free Africans. Yet all of those groups have been unambiguously integrated.
The Irish are not so different from the people that made up America back then. The Chinese who come here flee a communist/socialist regime, they are more than happy to assimilate to capitalism and the American way of life.
> [..] There aren't always "severe problems" with immigrants from different cultural backgrounds. Sometimes there are, yes, but it isn't a rule of nature.
As I acknowledged above.
> Those aren't boolean states. Someone can maintain a connection to their heritage while still being a part of greater society.
Right, but living in segregated communities inside another country is not maintaining a connection to heritage but simply not integrating.
The cultural differences between urban, suburban, and rural US are at least as great as the overall differences between the US and other countries, and I suspect you'd be weighing every word carefully if you tried making those same arguments for strong borders to keep the city people out of the suburbs or vice versa.
We would have to go to a more libertarian free-market model to make open borders work which seems like the opposite direction people want to go - especially those advocating for open borders.
FWIW, I read the article and found lots of hand-waving. Strong counter-examples came quickly to mind for most of it's claims.
It's saying pretty much the same thing as, "Think of how productive the world would be if there were no more crimes or wars! What if we stopped having police or armies!" Yup--that sure would be nice but I'm not going to hold my breath.
There is a way to get these mixed up: a mis-conflation of the short and long number scales, where a "billion" on the long scale is 10^12 (which, of course, on the short scale is called a "trillion"). If you're curious about this, I suggest you read Wikipedia's article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
Increased demand for housing will cause costs to spike, which means that those most willing and able to pay larger amounts will live where they wish, and everyone else will be relegated to far outskirts, including nonimmigrants whose incomes fall further behind cost of living. In this scheme, generous profits will be made by landowners of high-demand locations, and shareholders of corporations who can take advantage of the influx of labor and the expanded customer base. It's not too different from our world's current direction, except within a particular state, the absolute numbers of the wage class and the underclass would be much larger.
FTA: “If the worry is that future migrants might not pay their way, why not charge them more for visas, or make them pay extra taxes, or restrict their access to welfare benefits? Such levies could also be used to regulate the flow of migrants, thus avoiding big, sudden surges.”
Because illegal immigrants do not use visas. So you would be hurting law-abiding people and encouraging circumventing the law - if you can't afford the visa anyway, the question of "should I just through the hoops to get legal visa or try illegal immigration" becomes moot.
> make them pay extra taxes
Why would they pay those taxes? They'd just work on black market and report zero income and apply for welfare. High tax burdens reliably breeds avoidance and lack of compliance, especially in population that is kinda on the sidelines of the law as it is, as it often happens with migrants. And of course it would also sell awfully in the press - imagine an article of how a migrant from Guatemala pays a higher tax rate taxes than a billionaire born in New Jersey - how that would look in next congressional debate?
> restrict their access to welfare benefits
You can do it, but then you'd get exactly what welfare benefits are created to remove - a large population of people who do not have access to basic services, and thus have high level of disease, crime, misery and human suffering. If you accept the idea that welfare benefits are necessary because we should not have too many people like that in our society, then denying people in the country these benefits because they were born in wrong place contradicts this idea. Gating the access to this system on immigration status contradicts the whole premise of having the welfare system. I don't think there's a logically consistent model of welfare state with open borders at all - unless we somehow postulate that welfare spending has a reasonably low upper bound, which I haven't seen proven anywhere.
> Such levies could also be used to regulate the flow of migrants,
Of course you could, but why charging lots of money for visa would be more effective in solving problems we have now than any other method that's been used?
> thus avoiding big, sudden surges.”
Big, sudden surges usually happen due to wars, famines, economic collapses and other such events, in which case I seriously doubt visa prices are going to change anything.
You could then fund a guaranteed basic income (for citizens only), and just adjust the sales/tax yearly to balance the budget-- everyone pays taxes, no deductions are given, but GBI would guarantee people wouldn't live in poverty at all. It'd be easier to manage technically so we could dismantle welfare and handout programs as well as the IRS.
With current political and budget system, I don't see any path to this ever happening. Maybe in theory that could be a better solution (I don't know, it would need thorough analysis) but I don't see how it could happen in reality.
> You could then fund a guaranteed basic income (for citizens only),
Again, same argument applies. If GBU is a benefit for society, there's no reason to gate it on citizenship - we'd be just limiting the benefit on irrelevant metric, it's like demanding to lower your own salary if your boss' last name begins with certain letter - it'd be irrational. If, however, it is not beneficial to society but is a wealth transfer which benefits one group while hurting another, because the former has more political clout - one should argue this should never be done at all, citizen or not.
Something like this could then be adopted as a global currency and have gbi paid out to all members monthly. Perhaps we could create a not-for-profit corp that creates small businesses where 100% of left over income goes back to consumers who use the store (think grocery) and workers who work in the store as a bonus.
Anything a company pays money for goes to consumption including: Wages, Power bill, Land, Buildings, Planes, Trains, Transportation of Goods.
Poor would be offset by guaranteed basic income and universal healthcare. GBI would basically be a negative income tax, the 4% is variable and can be raised/lowered yearly whether the country's in the black/red - but only 1-2 points per year w/ congress's approval. Also 4% was just a number I pulled out of ass, could be 7 or 8% instead.
I don't see how poor would suffer under this if they have a guaranteed 30-40k income if they don't work one day the entire year. Sure they might spend all of that back in food, tax, shelter, etc..but they have food, and shelter which they may not have had before.
The only stipulation on GBI would be you must have a residence to collect. (If you want to remain homeless and spend all cash on Meth, that won't work, you need to at least get housing).
I've heard of schemes that involve fully paying for GBI using ONLY land/resource taxes, but I think that wouldn't be enough to pay for things. But we don't need a military as big as we have, there's lots of places we can cut corners and spend less money.
WE need to explore our budget and use tech to lower costs across the board as much as possible and streamline things.
This would immediately make non-documented people and visitors with greencards pay a lot of taxes. It's their choice if they want to stay/pay or go and not-pay their share, but the republicans can stop whining about immigrants not paying their fair share if they pay 3 times the sales tax.
Maybe do some research before suggesting something like this.
Those who own homes/land/property will pay more because they're expenditures are more.
Example: You earn 70k per year, you get 30k for gbi. That's 100k. Of that, you spend 80% on housing, school, food, clothes, toys, w/e, and invest 20% for retirement.
Of that 80% you spend 5% on taxes via sales tax. So roughly $4,000 a year in taxes.
If you earned 30k, and didn't work at all i.e. 30k from gbi alone, and spent all of it, you'd have spent 1500 on taxes, but still be able to feed/clothe/house a family in at least some comfort.
I don't see how that makes life unbearable for everyone? If you're an immigrant who isn't a citizen yet, you'd pay a bit more, but that's the price of coming to America, deal w/ it. At least you'll never be deported, or have your family ripped away from you, etc...
This is a libertarian pipe-dream that will never happen in the current political climate. They envision free movement and no welfare/safety-net (for at least alien immigrants). Even if that is federal policy, states and cities will pick up the slack.
The rest? Just another way to end up with millions of undocumented/illegal immigrants (like we have currently with impossible standards to meet for legal immigration). Can't force someone to pay "extra taxes" if they are working under the table for slave wages.
No doubt The Economist could care less if migrants pay taxes, for them they pay their way solely by providing cheap labor to businesses.
Half of undocumented immigrants pay taxes.
Source: https://itep.org/wp-content/uploads/undocumentedtaxes.pdf
The total local, state, federal burden of all the benefits they receive, greatly outweighs the pitiful amount they pay in taxes. 2017 stats indicate $19B paid into the system, $135B in services taken out: a net $116B loss to America. https://www.scribd.com/document/359997156/Cost-Study-2017-We...
Even if you say that "FAIR is biased", and discount the numbers by 50%, you still have a negative impact of over $50B a year.
California, ALONE, spends over $30 billion a year on services for illegals.
$10.6 billion in paid taxes: according to your link "overall effective tax rate of 6.4 percent". Explain how that is fair, please...
People who come here legally and illegally are just like you and me, wanting the same things, to work, live, and provide a better future for their children. They are human beings.
But I get it... freedom and markets when it benefits you and exclusion and socialism when it doesn’t.
> People who come here legally and illegally are just like you and me, wanting the same things, to work, live, and provide a better future for their children. They are human beings.
That's great, but it still affects people already legally here who also want to "work, live, and provide a better future for their children". The H-1B program gets a lot of ire from these parts because it has a downward effect on salaries and job availability for US citizens in the tech sector. But I guess that's no problem when it's the same deal just for jobs none of us would ever consider.
Source - Every economists research that either does or does not come true from proposed changes in economic policy.
This is true if you define 'coyote' as anyone who transports an immigrant to their destination country. Most people would just call them 'airlines', just as immigrants used to arrive on 'ocean liners'.
>Increased demand for housing will cause costs to spike
This is only true in the presence of severe restrictions on supply. These exist in some, but not all, areas of the United States with high immigrant populations. http://www.nber.org/papers/w13071.pdf
>It's not too different from our world's current direction, except within a particular state, the absolute numbers of the wage class and the underclass would be much larger.
For a thought-provoking modest proposal to realize these potential gains and ensure they are captured by current working-class Americans, see the Posner-Weyl Sponsor an Immigrant plan. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/13/immigrati...
If the worry is that future migrants might not pay their way, why not charge them more for visas, or make them pay extra taxes, or restrict their access to welfare benefits? Such levies could also be used to regulate the flow of migrants, thus avoiding big, sudden surges.
This is what the US does right now through the lottery system but it's just so restricted that no one in their right mind could call the US borders "open".
There are other periods of time that have been as good or better with a different political platform. In the 1950s (when America was “great”) the top tax rate was 90%.
Federal politics and the economy are linked, but not 1:1 and the net impact of changes to federal law often isn’t felt for years or decades (if at all).
50s was an anomaly with a 36% growth rate, like you said, because we were all that were left. The economy currently is very stable, diversified, and fast growing still for its size, some 70 years later.
https://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/gdpnewsrelease...
I keep seeing these overly optimistic GDP growth numbers, but I can't find them.
4% https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/15/goldman-sachs-model-now-poin...
Instead, since the 1970s, US thought leaders and business leaders of both parties long pursued similar trade policies that embraced deregulation and open markets, which allowed similar gains to be realized by US businesses operating in a globalized world (e.g. outsourcing, offshoring, integrated supply chains).
SV companies pay generously because dozens of companies flush with cash are all competing for the same pool of veterans of other companies. Any company that has less profit per employee (most small businesses) can scarcely afford to pay a premium for rank-and-file employees with domain experience; nor is there enough effortless mobility in specialty skilled manufacturing roles to make such escalating wages necessary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentag...
it would appear US is in similar leagues with Canada, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, etc, of having close to 0-1% in poverty. Check out the other countries in Asia or Africa if you really think America has it bad.
Something's clearly misaligned with the definition of poverty between your sources; you're differing by an order of magnitude
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty#Measuring_poverty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold
edit: strong lang.
If you look at the figures for net migration per 1000 inhabitants[1], the USA and Germany are pretty much the same for the period between 2007 and 2012: 15.94 per 1K and 15.54 per 1K respectively. For 2017, the USA sits at 3.9 (Canada 5.70).
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra...
Not to discount your experience, i am sure you've been through a lot of paperwork (i know i sure have, and i'm yet to meet someone who enjoys immigration departments!) but the US is pretty damn tough if you are not a) wealthy and/or b) highly educated and in demand.
You can get an EB1 (greencard in 3 months if you qualify.
You can get an O/L/E visa in a few months same thing with H1b.
And you have way more ways to get in.
Also you need to make the proper comparison with EU not just cherry pick a few countries. I can cherry pick countries to where it's very hard (try Denmark for instance).
My claim was EU vs US again 11 million illegal immigrants living here and for a large part contributing to the economy that alone would never happen in the EU.
And you don't need 1Million for a EB1. It's a merrit based greencard (just like O1 visa is)
You can also work in any state the second you are in the US.
I think you got the wrong information here.
Not at all. I know a couple that tried to move to Canada after Trump got elected but were shocked to find out they'd have to deposit 250k USD with the Canadian government for 5 years in order to be considered for permanantly residency.
Not only that, the demand for people to move into the US is tremendous so the competition is obviously very steep compared to less desireable places.
edited: strong lang.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sort by Net Migration Per 1,000 Inhabitants Australia 45.01 Canada 33.84 US 15.94
Even after decades, and generations, immigrants from certain regions have absolutely abysmal rates of employment in more developed countries they have settled in. How would an even larger scale of immigration flip the trend we can already witness, a complete 180 degrees? Many seem completely content on living on benefits alone, or fully unable to find employment with the skill set they have gathered, even when they have born in the country where the natives fare much better. The way I see it, the money that is being spent on these people could be spent with a far better interest elsewhere.
78 trillion, truly, is a fantasy pulled from a behind.
I think it depends on the specific form of migration to that country. For example the USA or Switzerland have very high skilled people coming to their country. In Germany too, but there was and is also a large influx of very uneducated migrants. Currently 55% of all welfare recipients in Germany are people with a migration background which shows that the opportunities/capabilities are not equal.
I do think though that welfare can still work with free movement, it is just that there would need to be a similar level in all/many countries.
...A world where everyone's mother is a prostitute would be considerably more economically active.
Its a shame the economy is seen as a end rather than a means.
I would also like to ask to whom would the majority of that increase in wealth go? I would argue it wouldn't be to the people doing the moving. It would be to the people driving them to move.
You don't get to discount China/India/etc.'s growth as "inevitable catch-up growth" on one side of the equation, yet fully count it on the other side.
As a consequence, I support reverse-mercantilist trade policy, foreign student education and practical training, outsourcing, and tech transfer, especially for countries like India which both have a lot to gain and are strategically highly aligned with the US (I acknowledge that China is now a more complicated case), to the extent that Americans can continue to bear these things. (Canadians and Australians seem to be fine with continuing these practices indefinitely, while also letting a pretty high number of skilled nonwhite foreigners from poor countries settle permanently.) And I violently oppose the grossly inefficient mass-low-skill-immigration policy that threatens to turn Americans, Germans, and others against the overall project while accomplishing so little.
An immigrant will capture a much smaller share of the value they generate, otherwise why use them, than a native born citizen.
This means that while theoretically 'wealth' is increasing it is increasing in such a way that those who are in the position to pay wages keep more of them and those in the position to receive them get much less.
In short then what's the point of an average in a power law distribution which by definition does not have a defined average?
Or to put it even more dumbly would you rather live in a world of 100 units of wealth distributed between the 5 quintiles as [80.0, 16.0, 3.2, 0.64, 0.128] or one of 20 units distributed as [6,5,4,3,2]. For 2/3rds of the people in the world the second would be better.
Why not use them, if they're more qualified?
The only reason why employers can fleece immigrants in US today, is because immigrants are effectively "locked in" - e.g. if you're on H1-B, you can't change employers without going through a bunch of paperwork; and if you get fired, they just kick you out of the country. Which, obviously, means that you can't negotiate from the same position of strength as a native. But remove those, and why do you think an immigrant would demand to be paid any less? We're not stupid.
Because you're poor. An Indian in India makes 1/20th the wage a US citizen makes in the US. If they get 1/15th you have just received a huge raise and are happy.
Besides, why would someone take 1/15th, if they can have the whole thing? I mean, by a similar logic, you'd expect people in US readily undercut each other at 1/2th, 1/4th etc in a race to the bottom. But we don't.
Listening to the dumps some of my co workers live in I can see why median hourly wages have not increased in the last 40 years.
This is political economy 101. One of Malthus's suggestions for reducing the mortality rate was getting exotic materials to become staples of life so food wouldn't be the limiting factor of population.
If you were to strip everybody in the Forbes 1000 list of their US citizenship (someone like Singapore or Monaco would surely step up to provide them with a valid passport), relieve them of IRS personal income filing duty, but allow their money to stay in the US economy, the economy would look the same and act the same. But the income disparity numbers would look much brighter.
If every American shopped on Rakuten vs Amazon, bought Samsung vs Apple, searched on Yandex instead of Google, banked at Barclays vs Chase, took a Didi vs Uber, if every hedge fund manager was based in Zurich vs Greenwich, US income disparity would not be so jarring, as the wealth would accrue elsewhere, exporting the income disparity with it.
Would the US economy be better off?
You seriously think poor people's quality of life hasn't increased in the last 50 years?
Go drive around "working poor" neighborhoods right after Christmas and see how many huge flat-screen TV boxes are curbside waiting for "big trash day" (small hint: a lot) or see how many people don't have smartphones.
I would argue that Wallyworld did more to bring up the standard of living for poor people than the last 50 years of social engineering but I know how much people like the downmod button...
I'm actually curious what quality of life metric you're judging by that's declined in the last 50 years?
And, btw, I wasn't proposing some new measure of Quality of Life through the size of the living room TV but using it as an illustrative example of technology becoming more accessible to more people at lower costs. Same with the smartphone reference, having the sum total of human knowledge at your fingertips seems like a quick and easy way to improve one's lot in life.
I do wonder if people would complain if Walmart managed to decrease housing and healthcare costs using their aggressive bargaining tactics like they've done with generic prescription drugs?
--edit--
Forgot a requisite huffpo link praising Walmart for prescription drugs prices (whoops, wrong link the first time around) --> https://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-a-london/a-way-to-save-b...
Perhaps the hedonistic acquisition of inessential physical goods is not necessarily commensurate with a higher standard of living?
While there has been progress in the past 50 years, there has certainly also been much regress. When measuring the advancement of a civilization, it seems something other than the pervasiveness of bigger, cheaper screens for reruns of Baywatch (et al.) should be the yardstick.
The quality of food Walmart sells is abysmal. The pressure Walmart put on food manufactures to drop prices played a significant role in the malnutrition and obesity in the us. TVs and smart phones are a very small part of Quality of Life. Having fulfilling work, good health, and a clean environment are more important aspects that Walmart worsen.
Making food less expensive is bad? Never really understood that argument but maybe it's just me...
There are studies on the percentage of income a family spends on food today vs. some time in the past (with "time" depending on whatever study you look at) and it has steadily declined. Less money spent on food == more money to spend on some other necessary thing to live a quality life.
Also, I'd put more blame on the USDA[0] for "obesity in the us" than Wallyworld selling people what they want to buy. People grow up believing in the Food Pyramid and end up becoming overweight through a "well balanced diet" dreamed up through regulatory capture.
[0]https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-bailor/obesity-epide... -- note: #1 result on the google for "food pyramid obesity" is the huffpo so it has to be true...
Making equivalent food lower cost is good. Reducing food quality to reduce price is bad.
I'd be careful making assumptions about the reasons people don't agree with you.
Taking the grandparent comment: "Supposing this is true, does it matter, if the overall size of the pie increases? Isn't everyone better off? Would you rather the poor stay poor so that the rich don't get richer?"
I don't disagree with this point because I believe economics is a zero some game, I disagree with it because it's wrong (it takes "everyone being better off" for granted), and I will be on guard to oppose any other initiatives (say, open borders) suggested by a group that thinks like this.
Getting into Harvard is a zero sum game. Becoming a professor is a zero sum game.
Getting a job at New York Philharmonic is a zero sum game. Getting concert tickets is a zero sum game.
Getting a seat in the supreme court is a zero sum game.
Getting into Google is a zero sum game.
The fact that anyone can somehow obtain a "smart" phone does not mean that we are richer. Most people I know do not feel richer than 10 years ago.
[1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-04-03
For those confused as to the difference between the two, reread pg's essay on How to Make Wealth. http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
I'd like to see more modelling on wage depression to see why this wouldn't have a widespread negative impact.
Additionally this seems like a weird point:
>Unskilled migrants care for babies or the elderly, thus freeing the native-born to do more lucrative work.
If lucrative work were available, wouldn't native-borns already be doing it?
It hugely restricts available options. Either from hours available, lengthy waiting lists or simply finding that after paying childcare work is no longer making economic sense.
The Economist's point is weird/wrong for another reason. Immigrant women have babies too. They can't be both looking after their own children and looking after other people's simultaneously. Expensive childcare doesn't seem like the kind of problem you can permanently fix by just allowing tons of immigration from third world countries.
The lady who lives and babysits across the street from my sister does exactly this.
There is a professional daycare on my block. I see the lady who runs it at our corner coffee shop from time to time. Her kids were in there with everyone else’s. (This was a point she marketed.) She’s an immigrant from Kenya.
Negative. As a child, of a poor family, my childcare was some combination of aunts, cousins, and family friends.
As a parent, while in the military, we often used professional childcare in the form of a daycare. Now, as an engineering, our nanny watches our children along with her own children.
So, personally, childcare has rarely referred to professional childcare.
No, not necessarily. It's more about availability. Even if you do assume it's "professional" childcare in some manner, it's one of the easiest small businesses to start. The regulations are strict, but the requirements are cheap beyond location and food.
My wife ran a daycare out of our house for a short period when our children were small, as it was more cost effective than having two children in daycare elsewhere.
Interesting to see how the rights people usually fight for become unimportant when it benefits you. I hope your nanny got at least minimum wage too.
Why not?
For the child, this is a time when they are developing language and cultural habits that will have a lifelong impact, ultimately impacting the quality of their employment and spouse. Immigrants will not provide that. It's hard enough finding non-immigrants who can provide it.
Want to guess who he's taken after? His friends. He has a much more neutral accent than either one of us.
That's not to say your interaction or the childminders will have no impact, but if any single person has such a substantial impact on the way your child speaks, then you should be more concerned about their isolation than the English skill of one specific person they're interacting with.
Source? Personally, i'd rather my kid have an immigrant baby sitter speaking and teaching my child in their native language. Plenty of studies around long term intelligence of children learning second languages early on....
This in itself may be a myth:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/debate-rages-over...
Hearing nothing but "crisply perfect English" as children robs them of this gift, and normalizes exclusion to them — at the level of awareness that all of the lessons we learn at that tender age: too deeply even to notice, let alone change, without considerable effort, or some specific motivating factor or event (which, having internalized exclusion, is structurally less likely to happen, in the first place).
To me, that's improper child care.
So 95% of children aren't cared for properly? Elitist bull.
It's a matter of degree of course, and there is no perfection, but that doesn't mean one should be complacent with less than the best.
Native-born workers often have advantages (such as speaking the language and understanding the culture) that let them mostly-realistically aspire to better jobs. Even when out of work, they aren't going to decide to be, say, farmworkers, which looks like a a hard, low-paying, temporary, dead-end job to them. Their aspirations have priced them out of the market.
Of course this isn't universal. Immigrants sometimes compete with other people who have a strike against them. Here's an article about the challenges hiring line cooks:
https://medium.com/@foodrepublic/how-can-restaurants-fix-the...
It was the first world war that changed everything.
Things like migration control, passports, visas, formal institute of citizenship, all traces to the time when the imaginary no. 1 boogyman was not Ben Laden and "angry Arab guys," but the German Kaiser and "angry Prussian guys"
The system of rigid citizenship, closed by default borders, and enslavement to a piece of paper called passport was forced onto the world under pretext "if you would not let us do this, the scary Kaiser will be upon you"
This day, it is the permanent surveillance state being pushed into mainstream buy the very same sort of people, and it will be upon the Western countries in no time if that party will not be punched hard in the face with all resolve.
Few interesting factoids from it:
Did you know that theocracy vs bureaucracy was not a decided topic in Europe until mid 19 century?
It was a single letter of a British envoy to China that shocked the crown so much as for it to institute the His Majesty Civil Service modelled after Chinese model of professional institute of career bureaucrats. Something that is traced to first Chinese states in known history.
My grandpa said that every modern state is made by "the 3 grave sins of Chinese people:" 1. Invention of paper, 2. Invention of money, 3. Invention of gunpowder. Indeed, without those there will be no career bureaucrats, no central banks, no conscript armies, and no modern state.
And on Prussians, rulers of the old Europe were not as much afraid of Prussian people themselves, than the spread of ideological "Prusianness." Today, the most relevant comparison to them are members of Ikhvan ul Muslimin in the middle east, and how Arab gerantocracy, and nobility is afraid of them as fire.
Just as with Prussia, Qatar is not as scare to Arab rulers than "Qatariness" - the virulent Qatari identity. An identity of people who are not afraid to demand their rulers to be rightful, and reward them with great loyalty for that.
Any links on any topics mentioned that you can share? Prusianness in particular.
1. providing good child care
2. adding value
Don’t you think that a PhD in their thirties would add more value if they instead focused on their studies subject?
Caring for her own children, she would instill her values as they grow. Her children would most likely get a love of knowledge and a determination to accomplish long-term tasks. Since she can produce many children, the number of people with these values experiences exponential growth from generation to generation.
If she instead outsources love to an immigrant from the third world, that other person will instill third-world values in the children. The likelihood of the children taking after their mother is greatly reduced, down only to any influence of DNA. The culture is not passed on. When fewer than two of the children take after the mother, there is an exponential decline.
In general, your direct impact on the world in nothing compared to the impact that your children can have. This likely applies even to the greatest scientists, and without question it applies to a random ordinary PhD.
What does this even mean? Please elaborate your hierarchy of cultures and their “values.” What about all the wildly successful and educated children of immigrants from these countries who are in the US now?
Yes. This world would benefit from having less kids, no doubt. Also less helicopter parents and more science.
If you're doing anything with your life right now that isn't full-time child-rearing, then you don't really believe what you said.
So it is not enough just for people with high IQ to have many children.
The adult needs to follow their passion/dream/work to develop the intelligence and contribute back to the society.
Smart people having more kids is not the full solution, but it is a part of the solution, and a neglected one. People already talk about improving education a lot. But it seems that education can only go so far -- some children get better results unschooled than other children get in schools.
I'm sure the same argument was made in favor of slavery way back when it was still legal. After all, slaveowners were free to pursue more meaningful things while their slaves were collapsing of heat exhaustion and malnutrition while working on the plantation.
Illegal immigrants often find "employment" at below minimum wage, and in inhumane working conditions, because otherwise what's the reason to hire them over locals? They're also more likely to be abused or mistreated, because what are you gonna do, go to the police?
A less harsh variant of this often happens with H1Bs, which I know all too well because I was an H1B myself 15 years ago: you get hired for a job that's way below your skill/pay level, and then you keep your mouth shut until you get a green card, which for some nationalities takes a decade or more. Glorified indentured servitude. If you lose your job - GTFO of the country in 2 weeks. Doesn't matter if you have a child or whatever, GTFO anyway.
It boggles the mind that people could be in favor of illegal immigration and H1B abuse, especially if these same people are in favor of worker rights and unionization.
I don’t see how letting 3rd world people strip mine the resources I paid for is a help to me? My wife and I have been in a crisis for months because our son’s school has taken in so many esl kids that nothing is being done to teach him—it is like he got 1/2 a 2nd grade this past year! It is so bad that my wife is now a “former liberal”—America’s kids should come first. We pay the damn taxes. We keep the place clean and decent and nobody is just going to come here and stake a claim to it and run us off so they can turn it into the shithole mess they fled from with gangs and child rapists. Fuck that and fuck them.
Rents up 10%. Everyone working longer for the landlords.
Gains go to land under the current system. We already added women to the workforce more, rents went up.
Just imagine: If housing were that great of an investment, everyone would get enough credit to build, making effectively everyone a landlord.
Part of the problem with today's economy is that it's basically impossible for a middle-class woman to have a child and work. There needs to be a large population of unskilled laborers to do these kinds of low-level jobs that a person with a college degree won't do.
This is why data shows areas with a large population of lower-class have a higher fertility rate.
It is safe to reject your model. Moreover, if you do not adjust your beliefs in response to contrary evidence, it is appropriate to presume that you are arguing in bad faith rather than trying to figure out the truth, and dismiss everything else you say on this subject. (This principle is equally applicable to someone arguing the other side of this particular issue in similar bad faith, of course; reversed stupidity is not intelligence.)
It seems like you have a lot of confounding variables to work through to make this case with such confidence, if you have research that makes this case I would like to see links to it.
There are a lot of papers which cover this. Starting with a Google search on population density and fertility rate, without including "causes" in the search, the top academic results I get are: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438781... https://www.jstor.org/stable/27503981 http://paa2004.princeton.edu/papers/41719
The population density-fertility rate assumption was not made without evidence.
I think that's exactly right, but also an unfortunate reflection on the way it needs to be framed to make people pay attention.
This is actually an interesting idea worth thinking about more. If the concern for those on the right is that more immigrants to the US would cause a permanent electoral Blue Wall by flipping Texas in a couple election cycles, and those on the left see economic migration through a humanitarian lens, then re-thinking what Citizenship means and the rules for participating in a democracy could be on the table as part of a compromise. I imagine a sizable percentage predicate their reason on wanting to come to the United States on earning money, not voting in elections (though I could be wrong, but I don't think I am and I doubt this question gets asked to newcomers). The natural reaction to such a proposal would be that we'd be creating tiers of citizens (Native Born vs Full Citizens vs residents or something along those lines). I don't have a problem with that, per se, but I can see how a lot of people would.
It's even more amusing with non-citizens who aren't green card holders, because not only they still pay all the taxes, but they're denied most of the benefits those taxes fund (so e.g. you still pay social security on your wages, but you don't get to actually claim any payments when a citizen could).
So I don't think there's any insurmountable political obstacle here.
But even beyond that, "taxation without representation", as originally used, didn't actually mean voting rights per se. The complaint, rather, was the lack of anyone specifically representing the interests of the colonies, because they were basically arbitrarily assigned to districts in Britain proper for the purposes of parliamentary election. So not only colonials didn't vote, but their MP would typically never even set foot on the territory he supposedly represented... which is why it was pointed out that it's not really representation.
However, representation was not equated to vote - keep in mind that the original franchise wasn't even universal among white males. However, those that couldn't vote were still deemed to be represented, on the basis that they lived in the same district as the voters.
Even today this principle still applies: while only citizens vote, the number of congressional seats, electors etc is calculated on the basis of the entire state population as of the last census, which doesn't distinguish citizens and non-citizens. So areas with large non-naturalized immigrant populations effectively award more voting powers to their resident citizens to "represent" the rest of the district. And this practice was explicitly blessed as valid by the Supreme Court in Evenwel v. Abbott.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Taxpayer_Identifica...
(The integration part is a touchy subject in Germany. My point more directed at the idea that you can have a country with a permanent class of non-citizen immigrant workers. You probably cannot do that in a liberal Western democracy.)
They also have had issues with "assimilation" for every ethnic culture but lately MENA has caused a divide. It resulted in them limiting their intake. You can read a lot about it via the recent refugee crisis. There were stories of gangs of migrants roaming the streets, I only heard about a case of rape but there might be more. I don't think its right to throw everyone together in the clump referenced. However, from talking with folks there — their collective German culture and German ways of doing things is very important to them. If you don't act or think German you certainly are an outsider. I also never got the vibe it was ever a skin color thing, but it is a language and cultural assimilation thing.
Other than violating many Constitutions you mean? It's bad enough to have invisible castes as is, now enshrining it into law would be a regression.
Importing Latin American politics by way of culture would be a terrifying disaster. There is hardly a place on earth with less stable government systems or human rights protections.
Transparency International ranks Latin America as the worst place on earth for corruption, only rivaled by a few parts of third world Africa.
Latin America is the most violent and corrupt large region on earth. People that think the US has a high murder rate, have never been anywhere near a typical Latin American country. The US has a non-murder violence rate comparable to developed Europe; Latin America's rate of non-murder violence is comparable to a war zone (and its rate of murder is best described as a war zone).
London's explosion of acid attacks, stabbing murders, and extreme violence problems are a crystal clear example of how you have to be very careful when you import foreign culture. Cultural adjustment & acclimation is very difficult and takes a long time.
Very few countries in Latin America function at all. They roll from one civil war, dictatorship and disaster to the next. The reason for that is cultural (and no, trying to blame the US for every problem in Latin America doesn't actually work as an excuse; unless you're going to credit the US for Canada's success and any successes in Latin America as well).
If the US is going to import a vast number of people from Latin America, it's also very important to not import the failed cultures of Latin America that have led to extreme murder rates, extreme poverty, extreme violence, and endless failed political systems.
Latin American Socialism is one of the great political and cultural failures of the last two centuries. It needs to die in Latin America, the sooner the better. Turning the US into a Venezuela, Bolivia or Brazil through cultural import is the worst possible outcome.
But I’d need more than a base assertion... can you address specifically the theory that the U.S. has deliberately propped up corrupt governments sympathetic to US corporations to the exclusion of democratically elected ones?
I think tying it to time should work out ok though since the value would increase over time by doing nothing. Everyone wants newcomers to have less say. At the federal level your vote would always be 1/1. As far as historical connotations go, that's for representation in congress, those people couldn't vote.
It's efficient because it reduces the bargining power of labour to nothing, and those that gain are the owners of capital. With no bargining power, benefits will disappear and everyone will be non permanent except those in very secure positions or in very specialist jobs.
People will no longer have a home - a place to belong, they'll either break up families with parents working on other countries, or children will endure an existence of jumping from place to place eroding the chance for normal development.
Society will be broken and the ability to self organise to build political movements will evaporate.
This will not be a nice world to live in for 99.9pc of the population.
If we are thinking of pie-in-the-sky ideas like open borders, then why also try to think of a way to spread good government and wealth across all parts of the world? I.e., spread the best practices so they become universal.
Some ideas in the past, like Europe colonising and controlling much of the world, are obviously out of fashion today. Yet ironically many people have voted with their feet (or would like to, if given the opportunity) and moved to Europe.
*This is a little melodramatic but it gives one a good sense of the scale of the problem with trying to bring everyone to western countries: https://youtu.be/KCcFNL7EmwY
Sales tax would be more of a consumption/outbound tax -- all outbound expenses would be taxed if you buy or pay anyone it's taxed on payers side. So example a company pays wages they pay a sales tax on the wage, they buy office supplies, pay dividend to shareholders, pay ceo a bonus or golden parachute, buy land, etc... People would be taxed for paying rent, buying food, buying houses, buying land, etc.. on the purchase/exchange of money.
GBI would paid out to all citizens and sales tax could be adjusted yearly to balance the budget if there's a surplus/deficit from previous year.
Welfare/IRS can be dismantled completely and everything automated via technology. Saving billions. We'd need a lot less accountants, and tax workers. Tax software for consumers wouldn't be needed, etc.. It'd shore up a glut of industry we don't need.
GOP'ers claim they hate immigrants because they don't pay their fair share, or will take their jobs. If they paid more than their share of taxes then it would get rid of that entire argument, and is the basis for my idea.
There could be tiers perhaps.. Citizen, ALmost a Citizen, Visiting w/ Work Visa temporarily, No documentation. W/ the last segment having the highest tax bracket. I mean no offense, but you'd then just need to choose does living in America = worth it by paying the extra taxes. At least you wouldn't be pushed out..
Maybe they could have another level Not-citizen but has voting privileges (of course that might come with a higher tax bracket in exchange for the privilege to vote..this would be up for debate obviously... ).
GBI wouldn't cost a fortune, if we get rid of existing handout programs, and streamline a lot of systems, also having a sales tax that we could alternate yearly to easily keep money 'balanced' would help with rolling out new features and testing scenarios to make sure we can afford something like gbi or universal healthare.
A lot of the systems can be automated, IRS does a lot of audits on citizens to make sure they're paying income taxes - we wouldn't do that anymore, we might still need a small agency to enforce that businesses are all in compliance, or that could just be on local/states to figure out.
The fact that there's no tax rebates/refunds would mean everyone pays taxes including the formerly in poverty now collecting GBI. GBI would essentially be their reimbursement/help. But it makes everyone a contributing actor, and if we need to raise sales tax to 15% before we can afford reasonable GBI, that makes sure everyone has a roof over their head, then it would still be worth it.
I think from a technical standpoint we also need to cut/streamline government in a lot of places. Healthcare, omnibuses, etc.. One thing I'd like is a github like format for bills, where you commit smaller bills, that are repealable, so big huge omnibuses are outlawed. It doesn't make sense that to get one small piece you as a senator want you have to vote for 10 pieces you don't want. Everything needs to be in smaller pieces so if something works we can keep it, if it fails we can revert the change like we would a bad commit on git.
The problem is the systems we use all require thousands of people to run, when they don't really have to, we could automate tons of stuff in the government but we don't because of all the jobs that would be lost. W/ gbi that wouldn't be a concern. I can't wait for robots/ai to take away 50%+ of jobs over the next decade freeing up mankind for more creative endeavors.
Then I'd build a not-for-profit grocery chain/and other businesses, where all fiat/crypto go back evenly to users of the coin. I'd buy up homes rent them below market rent values to try and drive rents back down instead of up.
Grocery stores would sell products cheaper, and profits would be split between gbi coin holders who live in that area, and workers at the local businesses we run. Execs at all companies we build would be capped at 100x worker salary. They'd also be not-for-profit (opposed to non-profit), meaning ALL money has to be paid at end of fiscal year to improvements of business, or to wages/bonuses/charity/etc.
I don't have faith in government to be the change we need, we're going to need to think outside the box and create self-sustaining government agnostic solutions.
Unsustainable because their children are automatically citizens. You are merely postponing the problem for some 20 years at most.
Either way, doctors, lawyers, delivery drivers, truck drivers, and 40% of other jobs will go away, replaced by AI. So, something has to fill the void to make it so people don't riot. GBI is the only thing that could possibly do that, unless you have a better solution. Instead of saying 'that won't work' I'd like to see you say, that's not sustainable, how about we do 'this' instead and offer up a suggestion that will work.
Why do you think illegal/undocumented migrants would do better than those supposedly born into privilege?
Why would they also do better than african americans or hispanics, who are already at least 2nd generation migrants (and most are probably much more "rooted" than that) and are still not doing so hot?
Both them and poor whites are at least native speakers and share the same culture with the majority of the country.
> by then hopefully they go to school, and start contributing to society.
That's a pretty big if. It also assumes a utopian world (or at least an utopian country) that is crime free and that by extension, ethnic criminal organizations also do not exist.
Complete and total globalization of everything on the planet (and perhaps beyond) might be inevitable, but I don't trust the people who are trying to make it happen right now to have any common peoples' best interests in mind, because I'm not naive to human nature (plus I've read up on them).
Freedom of movement doesn't prevent anyone from choosing any culture that they see fit, though. No-one is "disallowing" anything. If cultures end up blending into one, it would be a natural, voluntary process. So why is it inherently bad? Because of the loss in diversity? But if we can't maintain diversity as a species without use of force (which is what restrictions on movement are - at some point you have to forcibly prevent people from moving to implement that), then it would seem that we don't consider it all that important.
If that happens, then the unified consciousness would be incredibly lonely.
This in contrast to when cells assembled into humans, and at least the humans had other humans to talk to.
I think free movement is likely to amplify culture, not mute it. Right now I have to go through tons of hoops to live in Taiwan. The culture is precisely my aesthetic. I've spent untold hours studying the language. There are lots of Taiwanese-culturally-minded Americans and Dutch and South Africans who don't feel at home in their birth culture. Making it a big hassle for them to live in a culture that reflects their values just smears out culturally-Taiwanese across those countries.
It's also interesting that you think globally open borders would only affect the culture of America, but you're okay with that, presumably because whatever Americans consider to be their culture currently is meaningless in your eyes compared to the glorious no-nations-no-borders future world you envision, which conveniently has no negative consequences and is only a positive thing for everyone (except Americans who like their country and culture more or less the way it is now but eh tough luck for them I guess)
If you wanted that, would you not live in Manila?
Why dont we experiment in smaller scale with liberal companies like facebook/google/microsoft opening its employment where anyone from anywhere can come and say i want to be employed here and goog/fb/msft have to take them in? Lets even throw in a restriction that person should be cs degree holder from anywhere in the world. Lets see how it goes.
My friend working for Google moved later to Paris, France because she could and is still working for Google in France, I think companies like Facebook (in Ireland and certain European countries) or Google (literally everywhere in Europe) or even IBM (IBM has quite a few major offices in Asia, not sure why) already practice open border policies as part of a much wider remote working policy and have people from different countries working in different countries (aka somebody Spanish working in US while someone from US working in Ireland for example).
And remote work usually pays local rates (proportionally better than average, but still), not what you'd get in US.
If, yes. All this is conditioned on your racism that tells you that all foreigners are uneducated (and uneducatable)/lazy/freeloaders.
In addition, all of the tax money paid out would immediately be spent by these alleged freeloaders on meeting their needs for food etc., so it would flow back to producers of useful stuff and a lot of it come back as taxes.
Immigrants aren't magic, the ones that want to leave the most to come to the US are the ones from countries with bad education systems and bad social safety nets. Why would someone leave a good social safety net for a worse one?
>In addition, all of the tax money paid out would immediately be spent by these alleged freeloaders on meeting their needs for food etc., so it would flow back to producers of useful stuff and a lot of it come back as taxes
Except for all of the loss incurred by the things they consume. The only thing that comes back in taxes is a fraction of the profit on whatever they consumed.
Unless someone is producing more economic value than they consume, they are a net loss on the whole economy. There is a limit to how many people like this an economy can support before it will collapse.
It's just another insurance market like any other. The premiums coming in (tax rev) have to be more than the payouts (safety nets).
Anyone making minimum wage isn't necessarily using the safety nets either (depending on those nets, and how much minimum wage is), so /shrug/.
More to the point, as the original article also points out, we have had this exact natural experiment in the EU with the recent eastward expansions. Almost all poor people in poor countries stayed where they were. The ones that did emigrate to work... do work.
According to EU law, while there is freedom of movement for work (or whatever other purpose, as long as you are self-sufficient), there is no freedom of movement that allows you to go to another EU country and live off benefits. The "flooded by immigrants who live off of benefits without ever having payed into the system" scenario is exluded by law, and this works in practice.
Other countries could easily copy this system while opening their borders.
Given the rate of expansion of islam, i would say when not if.
Look around your own country and ask if the movement to the richer areas has helped the areas the people come from, or the all the people that were there in the first place or even really those that did the moving.
We keep recreating the slums of 1840s Manchester with every cycle and still we never learn.
Never take open borders arguments from anybody with a lock on their front door. Free movement is essentially the privatisation of borders for the benefit of the rich. You can have a border if you can afford to purchase enough land, put a fence up and hire the heavies to keep the riffraff out. Everybody else gets to fight it out in the mud pool.
The difference between open borders and visa control is simply this.
Do you believe that somebody should be able to walk into your house, sit down on the front sofa and demand Pringles, which you have to then provide.
Or do you believe that somebody should knock on your door first and ask if they can come in, you then invite them into the front room and offer them Pringles.
For the majority of poorer people whose outlook ties them to an area, not a profession, a country is seen as a sort of house share. And open borders fans are that annoying house mate who keeps bringing in new people without asking, and expecting everybody else to put up with them sleeping on the sofa.
The world will be a place where money is what guarantees safety. State welfare will be no more. No place is safe if it is free. Access to infrastructure will be open but cost money regardless of your citizenship.
If you think the future will be like that, you should stop paying taxes (as in contributing to the old model), move to a tax free jurisdiction and start saving funds (as in make sure you can live in a gated society).
The old model is collapsing (governments, countries, borders, citizenship) albeit slowly. Governments are getting more indebted and less efficient. Corps are making record gains. International trade is still thriving despite all. And the Internet is still here.
Move to the new model my friend :)
Firstly, the core thesis of the argument is that merely by moving to a richer country, people become automatically more productive:
> Workers become far more productive when they move from a poor country to a rich one. Suddenly, they can join a labour market with ample capital, efficient firms and a predictable legal system. Those who used to scrape a living from the soil with a wooden hoe start driving tractors. Those who once made mud bricks by hand start working with cranes and mechanical diggers
This can only be described as some sort of fantasy. People who have spent their lives making mud bricks by hand don't suddenly become qualified crane operators by mere virtue of migrating to a developed country. They need the same training any native born person would, but they also need to learn the local language and customs too.
Indeed, a common effect of mass immigration is that mechanical diggers and cranes are less used, because why buy expensive automated machinery when labour is nearly free?
A clear counterpoint is the state of Germany. Over 1 million migrants from Africa and the ME let in with no border controls worth talking about. Did they all immediately become high earning crane operators. No. Aydan Özoğuz, commissioner for immigration, refugees and integration, told the Financial Times that only a quarter to a third of the newcomers would enter the labour market over the next five years, and “for many others we will need up to 10”.
The Institute for Employment Research (IAB) found only 45 per cent of Syrian refugees in Germany have a school-leaving certificate and 23 per cent a college degree.
Statistics from the Federal Labour Agency show the employment rate among refugees stands at just 17 per cent.
The Economist also seems to struggle with the basics of why some countries do better than others. They do sort of comprehend the shape of the problem:
> On the contrary, the reason why migration is so attractive is that some countries are well-run and others, abysmally so.
> It is very hard to transfer Canadian institutions to Cambodia, but quite straightforward for a Cambodian family to fly to Canada.
Hmmm. So. Some countries are run abysmally, and others are well run. Why is that? The Economist acts like good governance is a feature of geography, something the Canadians dig out of the ground. But it's not, government is people, so presumably the people in those countries aren't very good at building wealthy societies. For example their cultures frequently turn a blind eye to graft, dictatorship is common, installing relatives in government posts is expected, work gets done slowly or not at all, votes are seen as things useful to sell for a bit more income and so on.
So what happens if all those people simply move to another country? Does their culture change overnight? And if not, what makes The Economist so sure that the bad administration and poverty those people were trying to escape won't just follow them to the west?
This problem is not theoretical or simply scaremongering. The sad tale of Lutfur Rahman is a warning sign of what can go wrong when large numbers of people settle in the west from parts of the world where western values are not well established - they don't simply change overnight and instead western political systems start to look like third world countries too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutfur_Rahman_(politician)#Cor...
Where did they say that? It's a common and well researched problem that institutions are not easily transplanted.
I am also not really sure what "government is people" is supposed to mean. Creating and maintaining institutions that produce wealth and stability is very difficult and dependent on many conditions like path dependencies and global embeddedness. In no case it was ever as easy as saying something like: Those people are just great institution builders!
Things like corruption aren't personal traits but rational under specific systemic environments.
There is a great book by Acemoglu and Robinson on that topic named "Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty": https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity-e...
By himself he couldn't have accomplished much, but with a large base of people for whom this sort of thing was culturally acceptable in that electoral ward, suddenly a part of London started to look politically much like a third world country.
>> Workers become far more productive when they move from a poor country to a rich one. Suddenly, they can join a labour market with ample capital, efficient firms and a predictable legal system. Those who used to scrape a living from the soil with a wooden hoe start driving tractors. Those who once made mud bricks by hand start working with cranes and mechanical diggers
>This can only be described as some sort of fantasy. People who have spent their lives making mud bricks by hand don't suddenly become qualified crane operators by mere virtue of migrating to a developed country. They need the same training any native born person would, but they also need to learn the local language and customs too.
Um, what? Of course they do. Capital is a complement to labor. Moving to a high-capital country means the fruits of your labor are multiplied because you can take advantage of that capital to increase your productivity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_intensity
>Indeed, a common effect of mass immigration is that mechanical diggers and cranes are less used, because why buy expensive automated machinery when labour is nearly free?
Labor is sometimes a substitute for capital, and we can observe this substitution at the margin as you describe. However, overall, capital is a complement to labor once scale effects are taken into account — as overall output increases after a right-shift in labor, demand for capital increases as well. This is the same effect behind why Luddism is wrong.
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/econ/labor-economics/supplem...
>A clear counterpoint is the state of Germany. Over 1 million migrants from Africa and the ME let in with no border controls worth talking about. Did they all immediately become high earning crane operators. No. Aydan Özoğuz, commissioner for immigration, refugees and integration, told the Financial Times that only a quarter to a third of the newcomers would enter the labour market over the next five years, and “for many others we will need up to 10”.
Refugees in Germany face significant regulatory obstacles to participating in the labor force.
http://www.dw.com/en/when-refugees-want-to-work-in-germany/a...
>This problem is not theoretical or simply scaremongering. The sad tale of Lutfur Rahman is a warning sign of what can go wrong when large numbers of people settle in the west from parts of the world where western values are not well established - they don't simply change overnight and instead western political systems start to look like third world countries too:
An immigrant from a third world country was corrupt, therefore corruption is endemic to all immigrant populations because they don't know any better? Not touching this one.
In the world of perfectly-informed, perfectly-rational, perfectly-enlightenedly-self-interested frictionless spherical humans, maybe.
Here on Earth, companies move their operations out of high-capital countries on a regular basis.
And while you're at it, ask how companies justify that as a boon for the country they're moving to, then reconcile with the original statement.
Because migration restrictions prohibit them from hiring those same low-wage workers domestically.
>And while you're at it, ask how companies justify that as a boon for the country they're moving to, then reconcile with the original statement.
Because those companies bring capital with them, increasing capital intensity in the destination country and thus increasing productivity and wealth.
Is it really migration restrictions?
Or is it arbitrage on minimum wage (which may not even exist somewhere else), environmental regulations, worker safety rules, etc.?
If developed western nations threw open their borders, they wouldn't simultaneously repeal all that stuff.
I like that idea!
If it was, cases like Rahman's would not have happened. After moving from Bangladesh as a young person, and becoming surrounded by political stability and economic opportunity, he would have adopted western values and become an ordinary politician. So would the people in Tower Hamlets, which has a very large Bangladeshi immigrant population.
In fact what happened was this:
• He engaged in massive election fraud, including buying votes, organising large numbers of faked votes, bribery, buying support of local Bangladeshi TV channels, intimidating witnesses and doubling council funding to local Bengali charities in return for their political support.
• He did this so successfully that he won a local election that was found (years later) so riven with corruption that it was declared by a judge to be entirely void and would have to be re-run from scratch.
• He also gained votes by telling Muslim voters that his political opponent was racist and that voting for him was an "Islamic duty".
• He was kicked out of the Labour party for having links with an extremist group.
• He benefited from a group of "enforcers", people attached to youth organisations funded by his council, who would visit and intimidate any Bangladeshi who spoke out against the mayor. This included threatening to burn down the houses of witnesses during the corruption trial.
• He has also been accused of extensive mortgage fraud and tax evasion.
Corruption, bribery, intimidation of voters, stuffing ballot boxes, buying political support, exploiting religion and race to gain support - these are all the sorts of behaviours strongly associated with third world countries like Bangladesh, but they showed up in the UK in the modern era too, even with people who moved as children.
If values were created by the environment, then this wouldn't happen (unless you consider the cultural effects of immigrants who pool together in the same areas to be able to overwhelm the cultural effects of the new host country).
But what causes this, and what's the "absorption rate"? With no migration controls at all, could such absorption be overwhelmed and cease working?
I presume you actually mean "affects" their culture (who could disagree with that), not "determines" (I for one disagree with this).
> Corruption, bribery, intimidation of voters, stuffing ballot boxes, buying political support, exploiting religion and race to gain support
Sounds like business as usual in Chicago...joking, of course I'm joking...
For half a century it was more stable than the west and it's economic advances dwarfed that of it's predecessor, the Russian Empire.
Scientific advances too, it was the first nation to send a man into outer space.
Yet western values were nowhere to be seen. And it's immigration policy was to prevent people from getting out.
You know where else you'd want to prevent people from getting out? A prison.
Have you ever considered that it isn't true? And I don't mean that snarkily, I mean it as a literal question.
To suggest corruption is a 'third world thing' and does not impact the western world seems to be disconnected from reality.
To talk about 'western values' in the same context is dangerously close to bigotry and jingoism.
And it's also the Economist that ponders the problem of what happens if the immigrants vote in an Islamist government (their solution: immigrants may never be allowed to vote, i.e. taxation without representation on a massive scale, which is hardly a western value).
Also, I'm not sure Theranos is a case of corruption. Seems more like a delusional founder who got in too deep and was eventually discovered and dealt with through the sorts of mechanisms (the free press, medical regulation) that is usually under the umbrella of "western values".
Also as a side note, Why is it that more developed nations have to find solutions for failed states by re-homing the population which voted for those same policies instead of leaving them to fight and improve the conditions in their own countries. Absolute globalist non sense.
Because developed nations have a vested interest in keeping international peace where possible as it is good for trade and national security.
You’re also assuming every country is a fair democracy, and that they can resolve issues without international support.
Remember that every developed country (including your own) has only been able to develop by leveraging cheaper labour and goods from 3rd world countries over the past 300 years, we are all very closely linked, whether you like it or not.
But what if people could migrate from the developed world to resource rich regions (like Africa and South America) and have the chance to unlock the potential of those regions? All that potential wealth which is currently held back by corrupt governments and non-progressive cultural habits could be unlocked.
Wait, that happened before and was called colonialism and wasn't good for the natives. But neither is uncontrolled inflow of third worlders into industrialized nations. Is growing global wealth more important than effects on local populations?
>This, they fear, would make life worse, and perhaps threaten the political system that made their country worth moving to in the first place.
The latter part of that sentence is of key importance. Ask the people of Denver what they think of migrants from CA, ask Mainers what they think of the Massholes and the way those groups have affected their society (comically, most Mainers would rather have more poor Somalis than MA migrants). It's really easy to say "well it wasn't that bad" as an outsider 50yr or 100yr after the fact but for the people who have to live through it these changes really suck.
>for five years, ten years or even a lifetime. This may seem harsh, but it is far kinder than not letting them in.
I support this so, so, so, much. So many cultural problems caused by migration would be solved if when moving somewhere your vote counted as 1/X and increased to 1/1 over some period of time. This should apply to citizens too. If I move to the next town over my vote should count at 1/X in town elections but still count as what it previously did in state/federal elections
As an aside, I thought this was going to be a piece about the cost to the economy of transportation and physical distance but I was disappointed.
The reason why Mexican immigrants make more money as mentioned in the article in the US would be erased under open borders. It would be a race to the bottom, globally.
Would you prefer to work a month to be able to afford a shirt, like it was just a few centuries before? Or do you prefer when "race to the bottom" made the cost of the same shirt into a few hours of work?
Rothschild holds only a small minority stake in The Economist.
I think it's less that this article wants to create a race to the bottom, and more that you fear the idea of the 1st world life you lucked into by birth being disrupted by a large influx of poor people who weren't so lucky in the birth lottery.
Jeez these new Nike's I have on are super comfortable.
They (the family collectively, or the family trust, however you wish to address their finances) were billionaires by the 1850s, at the latest.
"On July 18, 1815, a courier working for Rothschild informed the English government that Napoleon appeared to be suffering defeat at Waterloo... Rothschild began selling all of his bonds, encouraging rumors that Napoleon had won and that English government paper would soon be worthless. Due to Rothschild's reputation as an influential and respected investor, the panicked English public followed his lead. The mass selling resulted in a total collapse of the English stock exchange.
"It was then that Rothschild's agents began snatching up bonds and stock at record-low prices. Two days later, when Wellington's envoy confirmed that Napoleon Bonaparte had indeed suffered a crushing defeat, Nathan Rothschild was effectively in control of the English stock exchange. As of 2015, the English government was still paying back money owed to the Rothschild family from this Napoleonic maneuver."
https://www.investopedia.com/updates/history-rothschild-fami...
I don't believe in your (and the Economist's) false dilemma that my 1st world has to suck and I have to work for slave wages in order for people in the 3rd world to have better lives.
You say that is if that fear isn’t legitimate.
Like hell they do.
In the first two scenarios, the hypothetical worker is almost certainly not qualified to be operating any sort of heavy machinery. In the third, stylists/barbers tend to require certification.
I'm sure this paragraph wasn't meant to be taken literally, but it does nonetheless betray a gross underestimation of the costs of actually training someone to be an effective and safe worker in a new, more technologically-driven environment.
This would also affect government. You either end up with a large underclass that doesn’t have voting rights (see Qatar for example) or else they have voting rights and the laws of the receiving country change to reflect the culture of the immigrants.
I think you're overestimating the number of Americans who would have the means to do so, despite not having an income.
Which would be a qualitatively better situation for everyone, so I don't see the problem in that case.
If this is per month then its an interesting idea. But if this is per year then there is no incentive for the Western citizens to open their borders. Average income is about $30,000 per year right now. If the job market is flooded with workers then there is no way that people will keep on earning that much. Additionally, the housing market will explode and people who rent their homes will have to move.
I wouldn't be surprised if opening all borders would lead to even bigger gains. After all, China's source of income is their huge pool of workers. But I don't think that $78T profits are a good argument to convince the West to open its borders.
What if the entire world (democratic regions at least) sign some sort of pact, each city-state gets 1 vote. Each state is taxed x amount to preserve an international military force that's goal is to thwart axis-type powers that might arise, but needs a 60%+ vote from city states.
Maybe an ai of some sort could decide the size/scope of region that equates to fair city-states. -- Travel between cities/states would be open as long as you don't mean harm to the area. Cities/states could set their own solutions to problems like healthcare, drugs, basic income, jobs, etc...
I think large governments like USA/Canada/EU/China create represive regimes, smaller self-governed entities could run things better locally, and still have open communications/trade/etc with nearby states/cities. It would also be less-prone to corruption as you'd need to pay thousands more politicians (ones in each locality) instead of just in D.C.
Personally, I'd love to start a blockchain/identity project to create a universal basic income with fool-proof/sybil-attack proof identity system, making fiat currencies un-needed and creating one-world blockchain-based currency, that helps alleviate pain caused by automation. I think a monetary system like this could take away some of the power and corruption from government.
"If we had open borders we'd be $X trillion richer" is silly. It makes the huge assumption that institutions would stay the same, or inexplicably trend better everywhere, instead of worse. There is no thesis for why this is so, it is hand-waved here.
> Suddenly, they can join a labour market with ample capital, efficient firms and a predictable legal system.
This should prompt some navel gazing about:
* Why some countries succeed in building institutions and what is different about them.
* Why some countries used to have good institutions and now have dysfunctional ones. (Like say, Argentina, Lebanon, etc)
They might even learn something about why free movement isn't common.
> A Nigerian in the United States cannot be enslaved by the Islamists of Boko Haram.
The author has almost figured it out.
> If lots of people migrated from war-torn Syria, gangster-plagued Guatemala or chaotic Congo, would they bring mayhem with them? It is an understandable fear (and one that anti-immigrant politicians play on), but there is little besides conjecture and anecdotal evidence to support it.
Okay, he hasn't quite.
The planet is awash with dysfunctional institutions clawing away at function and semi-functional ones. Just going off of his Boko Haram example, the South Thailand Islamic insurgency is 13 years and counting of fighting from Muslim separatists. The Myanmar Islamic insurgency has been going on for 70 years and counting. The Somali civil war has been ongoing for my whole life, the Nigerian insurgencies over the years are numerous and ongoing, boko is just a continuation. I'm sure you know the story of other countries, weary reader.
So why isn't the thesis "A world of free movement would spawn a new era of separatists"? Crazy, yes, but at least we have some precedent for it as a nonsense headline.
No discussion of why nations differ in institutional quality is one thing, but no explanation of why the good-institution countries wouldn't degrade is another. As Taleb says, Economists don't seem to understand things that move.
~~~
A little tangential, but one of the things I think is under-discussed, is what happens to the places where people mass migrate from.
Recently there has been massive brain drain from Southern & Eastern Europe to West: Half of Romania's doctors left between 2009 and 2015: http://www.politico.eu/article/doctors-nurses-migration-heal...
In Venezuela, 40% of recent medical school graduates have left. Medicine shortage + lack of physicians = countrywide health crisis: https://panampost.com/sabrina-martin/2017/12/12/venezuela-he...
Other countries, like Lebanon after its civil war, are similar. Syria might end up similarly, I don't know.
It is hard to fault people moving en masse for a better life, but it further solidifies that the places they leave behind will continue to be governed by the looney bin for the decades to come. I wish there was a more thinking about solutions to this problem, and less glee at the capital class counting chips over the obverse.
I believe the answer for Argentina is "right-wing US support of right-wing death squads because of a fear of communism" and for Lebanon is "The pro-Western president of Lebanon requested American military intervention against internal opposition, which the US was happy to do because of a fear of communism", right?
> In 1913, the country's income per head was on a par with that of France and Germany, and far ahead of Italy's or Spain's.
Several bad government decisions changed that. No US support was needed to knock it off the list into a dizzying number of defaults.
The first Infamous Decade needed no help from the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infamous_Decade
(edited with more accurate dates)
The author uses Greece as an example, but Greece has nowhere the poverty of much of the developing world (and that’s a big number).
What incentive is there for the average middle class American to partake in such a grand experiment? Look at what happened when you introduced scarcity to an educated and industrious population after WW1. Mass genocide.
And let’s not forget housing inflation in developed countries. Immigrants are not going to head to Reno, they’re going to go to cities like NY, SF, LA, London—cities that they’ve heard about and where there are already large immigrant communities. Good luck adding another million people to NY over a three year period.
Nope, 90% of people would stay where they are. Most people don't like migrating: to uproot yourself and your family from the land, culture and language you love is a big deal and people only do it when the have no other choice.
Mexico has 125m people and the US has around 12m illegal aliens. Let’s generously assume that only half are from Mexico, that’s 5% of the population that was willing to take the risk to live in the US illegally. Now create an open boarder? You’d have 10% of Mexico moving to the US tomorrow. It’s human nature to want a better life and it’s also human nature to want to protect the life one already has.
The economist is like an anti-oracle.
Maybe open border can work for trade and business related immigration with sponsors on either side.
The US has long had immigration criteria that ruled out such people.
Okay, now take a US citizen that on qualifications is a good match for such an immigrant and see what their job and career prospects are. As we know very, very well, they are unemployable or nearly so. Well, so will be the immigrant. The ability of the immigrant to get a job, have a career, and support themselves and their family is from poor to zero.
So, why do such immigrants want to come to the US? And how can they hope to make it?
First, the usual way has been the immigrants were young men who left their families, friends, villages behind and did common labor, e.g., picking fruit. They lived several to a room sleeping on a mat on the floor. They were here only the warmer parts of the year, not through the winters. They got paid in US cash with no deductions for taxes or US Social Security. Then at least for the winter, they went home and took their US cash with them. Due to currency value differences, their US cash would go really far back in their home village. Of course, that whole situation is wildly illegal, on taxes and more. A US citizen here for 12 months a year can't do that and support a family or even themselves.
Second, if the immigrant brings their family, with children, then the family and especially the children are one heck of a huge expense for the US education and welfare systems, paid for by US workers paying taxes.
More broadly the OP does poor accounting: Sure, there are a lot of people in the world who are, in US terms, not very productive. Some of these people are current US citizens, and the US is struggling to get those people trained, into jobs, and productive. The US has many dozens of job training programs. Those candidate immigrants are on average less well qualified than the millions of current US citizens struggling to be productive in the US economy. Where do the OP authors get the funny stuff they've been smoking to conclude that immigrants much less well qualified than millions of US citizens who are already struggling to get good jobs in the US will do better than those already struggling US citizens?
Or, if those immigrants are such a valuable, neglected resource, then, sure, take some US tools, supplies, know-how, etc. to some foreign countries and give the people there jobs. Chrysler tried that in Mexico and has decided that it was a mistake and are returning to Detroit.
Uh, apparently to make people as productive as in the US takes more than just some people and training for a job; also required are huge investments in infrastructure from water and sewer, roads and bridges, suppliers and supplies, communications, regulations, laws, law enforcement, public health, medical care, citizenship, ..., the whole thing. The OP is being simplistic, straining over gnats and forgetting elephants.
IMHO, too many powerful people in US business see the immigrants as a new version of slave labor. In 1861, the US had a lot of slave labor and people who liked that situation; we fought a bloody war over that issue, killed IIRC 600,000+ US soldiers and maybe a comparable number of other US citizens. Net, slavery was a big mistake. Bringing back slavery will be a bigger mistake. The forces in favor of slavery have been strong for thousands of years and did not end in 1865 or so.
If the authors of the OP want to take some funds, rush to some country with lots of really poor people that are unproductive, set up some businesses, give those people jobs, training, etc., so be it. People have been trying that off and on around the world for a long time. We've long had international organizations for such development. Successes have not been anything like the claims of tens of trillions of dollars claimed in the OP.
So, the OP looks like really bad, simple economic and business arithmetic, so bad the OP does not look like economics. So, what really is the OP? Hmm .... For a candidate answer, consider the advice "Always look for the hidden agenda.".
As the article argues, this is better than excluding them from our labour market.
But discrimination like designating people as 2nd class citizens is probably more repundant to people's sense of ethics than closed borders.
And perhaps these moral tabu's are not without importance. I'm not sure, but "closed borders" do seem worse than a 2nd class of citizens.
My point is that the article argues that a "2nd class of citizen" is better than closed borders.
In many ways those arguments make sense. However, that doesn't make any of this feel better.
Reducing people down to a line in a calculation of your bottom line is dehumanising.
http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/...
Combine this dynamic with our current world in which the gulf between a small elite class and everyone else is widening with the middle class in between deteriorating, and you have a recipe for disaster. The modern welfare state that exists in Europe and to a (much) lesser extent in the US would crumble from the stress of millions of new individuals flooding the economy at the low end and being stuck there because of economic dynamics beyond anyone's control.
Rather than importing the impoverished from poor nations to rich nations, we should be working together as a community of nations to establish law and order where there is lawlessness. Once law, order and in particular property rights are followed and enforced, wealth can and will grow as it has in places like China and Vietnam.
Encouraging freedom of movement will result in poor regions becoming even more destitute. As one of my wealthy friends from Pakistan lamented to me once when considering whether she should move to Canada or stay in Pakistan, "if people like myself flee Pakistan, who will stay to build it into a strong and prosperous nation?"
Overall, free movement would be a terrible idea for most people. This article does a really poor job of considering the issue.
Today it isn't "workers of all nations unite", it is "1% of all nations unite in order to ensure free flow of capital and members of the industrial reserve army".
I'm not a marxist, I'm pro capitalism/monetarism within culturally defined borders.
It is owned by the Roschilds and every single day looks more despaired and afraid of the current economic situation. They want to shoehorn their rich owners solutions to the crisis so they remain unscathed in their wealth, while the rest of the population loses most of it.
One of the most craziest thing those rich guys are doing is financing with hundreds of millions of euros the immigration of Africans into Europe, like the 60 million euro Soros gave to a "humanitarian society" that does most of the travel form Africa to Europe.
There are more things in life than money, like culture, and people are starting to strongly react to the ipositions of those rich elites, Brexit and Trump are consecuences, but they are just the start.
There is a huge debt in the world that will be never paid, and the capital destruction that is coming is not going to be pretty.
There is no excuse.
Borders serve no useful purpose in a globalized economy. Can you imagine how terrible it would be if the states had hard borders between them?
People act like having open borders mean invading marauders of foreigners, but did everyone from Ohio invade Maryland because of the open borders the states have? In reality, most people would stay where their family and relatives are.
"My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, sometime in the future with energy that's as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere." - Hillary Clinton
Let's start by making annexing the states of Canada and Mexico into the US, and work other countries from there.
Do it.
If borders were a purely economic construct I might agree with you. However, they aren't, not even primarily. Remove modern notions of economics, look into deep history, and borders still exist.
As for Mrs. Clinton, she dreamed she could be President twice. We all know how that worked out for her and unfortunately us.
> People act like having open borders mean invading marauders of foreigners, but did everyone from Ohio invade Maryland because of the open borders the states have?
Because Ohio and Maryland are not that different. However El Salvador and the U.S. are and it might lead to huge problems (like the U.S. already has)
Also as you like Hillary Quotes so much: "Can't we just drone this guy" - Hillary Clinton on Julian Assange
You could swap out our actual Peruvian home builders for someone in Ohio (if they wanted the job) and it would be the same.
Like I said, there is no excuse. Cultural differences aren't big enough to warrant borders and impose trade restrictions.
Maybe you should leave your echo chamber every once in a while. I also live in the most diverse area of my nation, and while it is all fun and games when I am around well educated, well mannered people from different countries it is less fun when I have to cross the street in a diverse area with less high educational standards. The former by the way are already eligible to cross the border at any time (because they are legally able to obtain a visa) the latter aren't and really shouldn't.
That said, the cultural differences in the Americas might be less grave than Europe and the Middle East, or the U.S. and the Middle East for example. It really boils down to religion and education (in most cases), both of which are pretty similar in the Americas.
National boundaries don't really map to the borders of cultural and religious identity (as can be readily seen in the Middle East), so your argument here (which seems to be that the former is needed to preserve the latter) doesn't seem well supported.
That is because we already let immigration happen. And it supports my thesis really well, as this immigration lead to severe problems amongst groups of different cultural backgrounds.
> People could (and probably would) still live in communities with common cultural and religious ties, even in a world without national borders.And, in this world of international borders, people from disparate backgrounds manage to immigrate and integrate just fine.
Those groups living clustered together isn't integration but segregation.
It's also because national boundaries tend to be more about resource allocation and political necessity than the preservation of culture or religion. Look at the problems caused by the British Empire carving up the Middle East after World War 1.
Now perhaps you might argue the national borders there should correspond more to local tribal and cultural identity (and maybe they should) but the point is they don't, and they rarely do anywhere.
>And it supports my thesis really well, as this immigration lead to severe problems amongst groups of different cultural backgrounds.
At one time, Americans felt that Irish and Chinese immigrants could never properly integrate... to say nothing about free Africans. Yet all of those groups have been unambiguously integrated.
I work around Indian and Middle Eastern immigrants. Hindus and Muslims. It's remarkable how unremarkable they are given how incompatible "Western culture" is supposed to be to them. There aren't always "severe problems" with immigrants from different cultural backgrounds. Sometimes there are, yes, but it isn't a rule of nature.
>Those groups living clustered together isn't integration but segregation.
Those aren't boolean states. Someone can maintain a connection to their heritage while still being a part of greater society.
The Irish are not so different from the people that made up America back then. The Chinese who come here flee a communist/socialist regime, they are more than happy to assimilate to capitalism and the American way of life.
> [..] There aren't always "severe problems" with immigrants from different cultural backgrounds. Sometimes there are, yes, but it isn't a rule of nature.
As I acknowledged above.
> Those aren't boolean states. Someone can maintain a connection to their heritage while still being a part of greater society.
Right, but living in segregated communities inside another country is not maintaining a connection to heritage but simply not integrating.
An internet with no firewalls and free, unauthenticated root access would be $78T richer.
It's saying pretty much the same thing as, "Think of how productive the world would be if there were no more crimes or wars! What if we stopped having police or armies!" Yup--that sure would be nice but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Let's not pretend the majority of that wealth wouldn't accumulate in a small number of pockets.
$78 trillion = $78,000 billion (or many, many, many times Jeff Bezos)
There is a way to get these mixed up: a mis-conflation of the short and long number scales, where a "billion" on the long scale is 10^12 (which, of course, on the short scale is called a "trillion"). If you're curious about this, I suggest you read Wikipedia's article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales