7 ms·

>So - while I would prefer a "monitored solution" to border control over physical imposing measures, my real preference would be for us to all work toward elimi

by _iyig 7y ago

>So - while I would prefer a "monitored solution" to border control over physical imposing measures, my real preference would be for us to all work toward eliminating these national-level borders completely. You sound like someone with the ability to live anywhere, who consequently has little stake in their current "somewhere." Lots of Americans (and people in other countries) don't have this flexibility. They are directly and inescapably effected by the de facto U.S. open border policy for low-skilled workers. For example: I have family in New England who ran an all-organic dairy farm. They had to shut down a few years ago, in part because they couldn't compete with the farms who paid undocumented workers under the table. At the same time, their rural community has been decimated by the opioid crisis. Most fentanyl in the U.S. comes in via the unsecured border with Mexico [0]. We've seen what happens when other countries adopt wholesale open borders policies. In Germany, the 2015 migrant crisis nearly brought the far-right "Alternativ für Deutschland" into power. That crisis only abated once the Balkan states took it upon themselves to secure the E.U.'s southern border. Finally, I also think it's likely that any compromise to solve the border crises will involve additional border security measure. We've come close enough before to know what such a bill might look like - remember when George W. Bush strongly supported the DREAM Act, amnesty, and a path to citizenship? [1]. Why not develop the necessary technology now? [0] https://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-mexico-drugs-20190706-story.html https://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-mexico-d... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Immigration_Reform_Act_of_2007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Immigration_Refo...

akhilcacharya 7y ago
> who consequently has little stake in their current "somewhere." As first generation American this is dangerously misguided and follows the debunked lump of labor fallacy. It reminds me of the "rootless cosmopolitan" slur.
- _iyig 7y ago
  >It reminds me of the "rootless cosmopolitan" slur You have no idea how offensive and ridiculous that statement is to me. It’s the reality that if you earn more than a certain amount of money, and posses an advanced degree plus a certain amount of capital, your relocation options are vastly greater than someone with fewer credentials, less capital, and a smaller salary.
caconym_ 7y ago
If we want to stop undocumented workers from fueling a race to the bottom in unskilled labor markets, we should make more than a token effort to go after the business owners who employ them, and impose meaningful punishments to deter others. This is just another example of the gross hypocrisy of the GOP: it's well documented at this point that businesses owned by their top man make a habit of employing undocumented workers. We won't fix anything without accountability, and there are two sides to supply and demand. What we're doing now is theater.
- sjg007 7y ago
  I agree. We should have a guest worker program if they job exists. Have an app that monitors compliance, pays taxes etc... It's the businesses that want the unlawful immigrants precisely because they can pay them so little and have no worker protections. And we see that ICE raids basically shutdown processing plants and farms when they clear out a whole community.
- _iyig 7y ago
  >This is just another example of the gross hypocrisy of the GOP I’m not a member of the GOP. Extremely far from it. >We won't fix anything without accountability, and there are two sides to supply and demand. Yes, of course. Punish those who exploit undocumented workers. Of course, it’s much harder to exploit an undocumented workforce when it doesn’t exist or is reduced in size. Many ways to achieve this (paths to citizenship, etc.); Anduril is just one piece of the solution, as I suggest in my original comment.
  - caconym_ 7y ago
    > I’m not a member of the GOP. Extremely far from it. I didn't mean to imply you were or were not a member of the GOP. I included the observation about their hypocrisy simply because they are the largest group making the most noise about border security while clearly not actually giving a shit about Americans' jobs being "taken" by undocumented laborers. > Yes, of course. Punish those who exploit undocumented workers. Of course, it’s much harder to exploit an undocumented workforce when it doesn’t exist or is reduced in size. Many ways to achieve this (paths to citizenship, etc.); Anduril is just one piece of the solution, as I suggest in my original comment. If hiring them gets you thrown in prison, they will suddenly have a much harder time getting hired, and after some time employment will cease to be a reason to cross the border illegally. We don't have to fuck around with "virtual border technology" to accomplish this; all we have to do is recognize that (relatively) wealthy business owners are not above the law, but in America we have an astonishingly hard time with this. It's like the Brock Turner judge's mindset is baked into half the population from birth.
chipotle_coyote 7y ago
> Most fentanyl in the U.S. comes in via the unsecured border with Mexico "Unsecured" is being asked to do an awful lot of work in that sentence. Smugglers aren't driving trucks full of contraband over the open desert through areas where Trump's (or Palmer's) "wall," whether real or virtual, would stop them. They're smuggling them through established checkpoints. If you want to reduce the drug trade, better techniques for catching smugglers at the checkpoints will help, and reducing demand -- which is being driven by customers in the United States -- will help even more. "Build the wall!" will not. I'm sorry about your dairy-farming family in New England, but if we go by statistics rather than anecdotes, there's been a lot of studies on the modern industrial farming economy which conclude that trying to chase out all the undocumented immigrants is attacking the wrong side of the problem. If farmers weren't hiring them, they wouldn't come here to work. Most farmers will tell you that Americans won't work for the low wages that they feel they have to pay farm hands, so they have to hire those undocumented workers. They feel they have to pay the farm hands that low because the prices they can charge are largely set by their huge agribusiness customers. Going after the infamously exploited undocumented workers at the end of this whole chain isn't going to solve the problem. In any case, there aren't actually many people in power in the US who are calling for "wholesale open border policies," the person you're responding to notwithstanding. The intense fight in the Trump era over this stems from the uncomfortable fact that the people we're seeing in camps and cages on the borders of the US, the people we keep trying to punish for coming here in ever more brutal fashion, are not trying to make illegal border crossings. They are coming here to legally apply for asylum. If the world is serious about solving "the migrant crisis," then perhaps we should stop trying to desperately fight against people being displaced and driven out of their homelands and start trying to address the issues that are displacing them and driving them out.
- _iyig 7y ago
  >Most farmers will tell you that Americans won't work for the low wages that they feel they have to pay farm hands, so they have to hire those undocumented workers. If cheap labor was unavailable, would American farms shut down? I don’t think so. I think they’d raise wages until Americans were willing to work for them, and pass the price along to consumers. I think the status quo (undocumented laborers working for low wages in terrible conditions with no healthcare, all to subsidize $0.50 oranges at Safeway) is a humanitarian tragedy equivalent to the worst Nike sweatshops. >the people we're seeing in camps and cages on the borders of the US, the people we keep trying to punish for coming here in ever more brutal fashion, are not trying to make illegal border crossings. Right. Anduril’s work would not affect these people, so why all these comments calling them literally evil?
rmilejczz 7y ago
Sad that you make almost no effort to push responsibility on the people hiring undocumented workers
- _iyig 7y ago
  Your low-effort comment on a throwaway account is detracting from this discussion. I absolutely support harsh punishments for those who employ undocumented laborers illegally (why would I not?). That issue has zero bearing on whether Anduril’s work is “evil.”
  - rmilejczz 7y ago
    All I’m saying is that it’s appalling to see all of these “solutions” almost completely ignore the root problem and instead become obsessed with “border security”. Our borders are secure, immigration is not a threat to your life, the problem is almost purely economic and I think that is the more fruitful discussion I meant no particular offense to you, I see this sentiment regularly in online forums and repeated throughout comments here, your comment was just the one I happened to reply to.
    - gonational 7y ago
      > immigration is not a threat to your life My wife and I have both been hit by illegal immigrants. One of them driving drunk and drinking in the car while he hit me, and had no insurance or license, and had a prior DUI that he missed court for. The other (one that hit my wife’s car) simply didn’t have insurance, but wasn’t drinking. My wife’s car had to be repaired heavily (over $5,000), which was paid for by our insurance, and the $500 adoptable was paid for by us. When my car was hit in the back, both of us were in the car, both of us had serious concussions because this accident was much worse. This is the one where the guy was driving with a beer in his hand, and he tried to leave the scene of the accident but one of his engine’s Peripherals was hanging out Of his hood and he couldn’t get his car to start. The fact that the people in question were immigrants (one from Honduras, the other I’m not sure) Is not the problem. The problem is that they are here illegally and in a sanctuary county, which means that the law-enforcement is in a Weird position where they cannot really do anything about petty crimes like driving under the influence, because it’s an expensive process of dealing with the county. So, in both cases, these people are still roaming around probably hitting other people, meanwhile both of us have had to pay to fix our own vehicles and had at least medium level injuries (concussion symptoms last for a lot longer than I realized, and we were both Having serious issues a month later). So, while immigrants don’t necessarily Harm people, illegal immigration certainly does.
ndarwincorn 7y ago
> You sound like someone with the ability to live anywhere, who consequently has little stake in their current "somewhere." And you sound like someone with the same privilege speaking from a place of paternalism. Restrictive borders disproportionately harm the poor. > I have family in New England who ran an all-organic dairy farm. They had to shut down a few years ago, in part because they couldn't compete with the farms who paid undocumented workers under the table. Others have already debunked your trafficking claim, but your anecdote about an all-organic dairy farm is particularly laughable. 'Dey took ar jerbs' has been debunked for decades now.[1] My mom grew up on a dairy farm in New England (I'm visiting my Grandma there in a month), and I can tell you that there's plenty of reasons that most of them are closing/consolidating, and undocumented labor isn't even top-5. > In Germany, the 2015 migrant crisis nearly brought the far-right "Alternativ für Deutschland" into power. That crisis only abated once the Balkan states took it upon themselves to secure the E.U.'s southern border. Wait, the migrants and open borders are to blame for xenophobia? You do well to point out that Bush supported the DREAM act and take about as wrong a lesson from that as you possibly could. The lesson is not 'give the xenophobes a compromise to get slightly-more-sane immigration policies', it's that the rise in ultra-right wing nationalism/xenophobia around the world in the last decade should be the real thing keeping people up at night, not some imagined migrant 'invasion'. [1]https://contexts.org/articles/the-economics-of-migration/ https://contexts.org/articles/the-economics-of-migration/
- _iyig 7y ago
  Your article leaves out a lot, and you present a false consensus. Here are some counterpoints: "Illegal immigration to the United States in recent decades has tended to depress both wages and employment rates for low-skilled American citizens, a disproportionate number of whom are black men." This would seem to contradict your statement that, "Restrictive borders disproportionately harm the poor." https://www.usccr.gov/pubs/docs/IllegImmig_10-14-10_430pm.pdf https://www.usccr.gov/pubs/docs/IllegImmig_10-14-10_430pm.pd... "Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable. The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually. According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year." "But that’s only one side of the story. Somebody’s lower wage is always somebody else’s higher profit. In this case, immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer. And the additional profits are so large that the economic pie accruing to all natives actually grows. I estimate the current “immigration surplus”—the net increase in the total wealth of the native population—to be about$50 billion annually. But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year." tl;dr Low-skilled citizens are still hurt, and the "bigger economic pie" from illegal immigration turns out to mainly be due to wealth concentration and bad statistics. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinton-immigration-economy-unemployment-jobs-214216 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinto... >Wait, the migrants and open borders are to blame for xenophobia? No, lots of people in Germany are worried about mass-migration because... you know, just read my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20957989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20957989
Faark 7y ago
> We've seen what happens when other countries adopt wholesale open borders policies. [..AfD] You make it sound like there was an actual negative impacts. I haven't seen much "horrible" data on that front. It certainly gives ammo to fearmongers, but how does this make it a less good goal to strive for?
- _iyig 7y ago
  You mean besides the mass sexual violence in Cologne, the Berlin Christmas market attack, or the fact that migrants in Germany are disproportionately more likely to commit violent crimes [0][1][2]? What really gets me is headlines like “German far-right capitalizes on migrant crimes,” as if those politicians were happy the crimes had been committed or consented to the policy decisions that led to them occurring. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-germany-crime/violent-crime-rises-in-germany-and-is-attributed-to-refugees-idUSKBN1ES16J https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-germany-c... [1] https://www.thelocal.de/20190415/german-far-right-capitalizes-on-migrant-crimes-in-eu-elections-campaign https://www.thelocal.de/20190415/german-far-right-capitalize... [2] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/germans-shaken-by-series-of-violent-immigrant-attacks-1.3952832 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/germans-shaken-...
  - neotek 7y ago
    None of your links support your claim that migrants are more likely to commit violent crimes, in fact they present evidence that dispels that (very obvious) lie. They also point out that the far-right groups that are spreading this propaganda as a means to promote their racist agenda are lying: >But it turned out, several cases did not take place in Europe, and, with the exception of one case, there is no evidence supporting the claim that the perpetrators were migrants or Muslims. Very disingenuous, but nothing out of the ordinary for bigoted organisations that exist only to diminish humanity.
    - _iyig 7y ago
      Well, you're lying. Might be impolite to mention, but I don't know what else to say. First link, Reuters: "Violent crime rose by about 10 percent in 2015 and 2016, a study showed. It attributed more than 90 percent of that to young male refugees." Second link, The Local: "Police statistics show that 38.6 percent of violent crimes were committed by foreigners in 2018" (Ethnic Germans make up 76% of the population) Third link is there to illustrate specific cases. In case you remain unconvinced, even the BBC is with me on this, with a much more detailed statistical breakdown: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45419466 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45419466 Groups like AfD thrive when people like you make assertions that are so easily disproven. They screenshot comments like yours and photoshop them next to the type of articles and headlines that I linked. Unfortunately, such images make effective recruitment tools.
darksaints 7y ago
> At the same time, their rural community has been decimated by the opioid crisis. Most fentanyl in the U.S. comes in via the unsecured border with Mexico [0]. Pretend you are a border control officer and your sole objective is to stop illegal drugs from entering our borders. What situation would you rather have: a) Thousands of peaceful people jumping the border in pickup trucks intermixed with a handful of drug smugglers and gang members. or b) Thousands of peaceful people lining up at a border checkpoint or consulate, with a handful of drug smugglers and gang members jumping the border in pickup trucks. You should try legalizing more immigration. It gives us more control over the process and more selectivity and enforcement capability, not less.
- _iyig 7y ago
  And wouldn’t it be great if some company - say, Anduril - built the tech to catch those drug smugglers and gang members?
aledalgrande 7y ago
Radical idea: why not giving a legal path to whoever wants to enter instead? Illegal work would become much less frequent and convenient and business owners would be forced to pay a fair wage to these now documented immigrants or get sued. Then you would not have any more unfair competition.

by _iyig 7y ago

akhilcacharya 7y ago

> who consequently has little stake in their current "somewhere." As first generation American this is dangerously misguided and follows the debunked lump of labor fallacy. It reminds me of the "rootless cosmopolitan" slur.

_iyig 7y ago
>It reminds me of the "rootless cosmopolitan" slur You have no idea how offensive and ridiculous that statement is to me. It’s the reality that if you earn more than a certain amount of money, and posses an advanced degree plus a certain amount of capital, your relocation options are vastly greater than someone with fewer credentials, less capital, and a smaller salary.

caconym_ 7y ago

If we want to stop undocumented workers from fueling a race to the bottom in unskilled labor markets, we should make more than a token effort to go after the business owners who employ them, and impose meaningful punishments to deter others. This is just another example of the gross hypocrisy of the GOP: it's well documented at this point that businesses owned by their top man make a habit of employing undocumented workers. We won't fix anything without accountability, and there are two sides to supply and demand. What we're doing now is theater.

sjg007 7y ago
I agree. We should have a guest worker program if they job exists. Have an app that monitors compliance, pays taxes etc... It's the businesses that want the unlawful immigrants precisely because they can pay them so little and have no worker protections. And we see that ICE raids basically shutdown processing plants and farms when they clear out a whole community.
_iyig 7y ago
>This is just another example of the gross hypocrisy of the GOP I’m not a member of the GOP. Extremely far from it. >We won't fix anything without accountability, and there are two sides to supply and demand. Yes, of course. Punish those who exploit undocumented workers. Of course, it’s much harder to exploit an undocumented workforce when it doesn’t exist or is reduced in size. Many ways to achieve this (paths to citizenship, etc.); Anduril is just one piece of the solution, as I suggest in my original comment.
- caconym_ 7y ago
  > I’m not a member of the GOP. Extremely far from it. I didn't mean to imply you were or were not a member of the GOP. I included the observation about their hypocrisy simply because they are the largest group making the most noise about border security while clearly not actually giving a shit about Americans' jobs being "taken" by undocumented laborers. > Yes, of course. Punish those who exploit undocumented workers. Of course, it’s much harder to exploit an undocumented workforce when it doesn’t exist or is reduced in size. Many ways to achieve this (paths to citizenship, etc.); Anduril is just one piece of the solution, as I suggest in my original comment. If hiring them gets you thrown in prison, they will suddenly have a much harder time getting hired, and after some time employment will cease to be a reason to cross the border illegally. We don't have to fuck around with "virtual border technology" to accomplish this; all we have to do is recognize that (relatively) wealthy business owners are not above the law, but in America we have an astonishingly hard time with this. It's like the Brock Turner judge's mindset is baked into half the population from birth.

chipotle_coyote 7y ago

> Most fentanyl in the U.S. comes in via the unsecured border with Mexico "Unsecured" is being asked to do an awful lot of work in that sentence. Smugglers aren't driving trucks full of contraband over the open desert through areas where Trump's (or Palmer's) "wall," whether real or virtual, would stop them. They're smuggling them through established checkpoints. If you want to reduce the drug trade, better techniques for catching smugglers at the checkpoints will help, and reducing demand -- which is being driven by customers in the United States -- will help even more. "Build the wall!" will not. I'm sorry about your dairy-farming family in New England, but if we go by statistics rather than anecdotes, there's been a lot of studies on the modern industrial farming economy which conclude that trying to chase out all the undocumented immigrants is attacking the wrong side of the problem. If farmers weren't hiring them, they wouldn't come here to work. Most farmers will tell you that Americans won't work for the low wages that they feel they have to pay farm hands, so they have to hire those undocumented workers. They feel they have to pay the farm hands that low because the prices they can charge are largely set by their huge agribusiness customers. Going after the infamously exploited undocumented workers at the end of this whole chain isn't going to solve the problem. In any case, there aren't actually many people in power in the US who are calling for "wholesale open border policies," the person you're responding to notwithstanding. The intense fight in the Trump era over this stems from the uncomfortable fact that the people we're seeing in camps and cages on the borders of the US, the people we keep trying to punish for coming here in ever more brutal fashion, are not trying to make illegal border crossings. They are coming here to legally apply for asylum. If the world is serious about solving "the migrant crisis," then perhaps we should stop trying to desperately fight against people being displaced and driven out of their homelands and start trying to address the issues that are displacing them and driving them out.

_iyig 7y ago
>Most farmers will tell you that Americans won't work for the low wages that they feel they have to pay farm hands, so they have to hire those undocumented workers. If cheap labor was unavailable, would American farms shut down? I don’t think so. I think they’d raise wages until Americans were willing to work for them, and pass the price along to consumers. I think the status quo (undocumented laborers working for low wages in terrible conditions with no healthcare, all to subsidize $0.50 oranges at Safeway) is a humanitarian tragedy equivalent to the worst Nike sweatshops. >the people we're seeing in camps and cages on the borders of the US, the people we keep trying to punish for coming here in ever more brutal fashion, are not trying to make illegal border crossings. Right. Anduril’s work would not affect these people, so why all these comments calling them literally evil?

rmilejczz 7y ago

Sad that you make almost no effort to push responsibility on the people hiring undocumented workers

_iyig 7y ago
Your low-effort comment on a throwaway account is detracting from this discussion. I absolutely support harsh punishments for those who employ undocumented laborers illegally (why would I not?). That issue has zero bearing on whether Anduril’s work is “evil.”
- rmilejczz 7y ago
  All I’m saying is that it’s appalling to see all of these “solutions” almost completely ignore the root problem and instead become obsessed with “border security”. Our borders are secure, immigration is not a threat to your life, the problem is almost purely economic and I think that is the more fruitful discussion I meant no particular offense to you, I see this sentiment regularly in online forums and repeated throughout comments here, your comment was just the one I happened to reply to.
  - gonational 7y ago
    > immigration is not a threat to your life My wife and I have both been hit by illegal immigrants. One of them driving drunk and drinking in the car while he hit me, and had no insurance or license, and had a prior DUI that he missed court for. The other (one that hit my wife’s car) simply didn’t have insurance, but wasn’t drinking. My wife’s car had to be repaired heavily (over $5,000), which was paid for by our insurance, and the $500 adoptable was paid for by us. When my car was hit in the back, both of us were in the car, both of us had serious concussions because this accident was much worse. This is the one where the guy was driving with a beer in his hand, and he tried to leave the scene of the accident but one of his engine’s Peripherals was hanging out Of his hood and he couldn’t get his car to start. The fact that the people in question were immigrants (one from Honduras, the other I’m not sure) Is not the problem. The problem is that they are here illegally and in a sanctuary county, which means that the law-enforcement is in a Weird position where they cannot really do anything about petty crimes like driving under the influence, because it’s an expensive process of dealing with the county. So, in both cases, these people are still roaming around probably hitting other people, meanwhile both of us have had to pay to fix our own vehicles and had at least medium level injuries (concussion symptoms last for a lot longer than I realized, and we were both Having serious issues a month later). So, while immigrants don’t necessarily Harm people, illegal immigration certainly does.

ndarwincorn 7y ago

> You sound like someone with the ability to live anywhere, who consequently has little stake in their current "somewhere." And you sound like someone with the same privilege speaking from a place of paternalism. Restrictive borders disproportionately harm the poor. > I have family in New England who ran an all-organic dairy farm. They had to shut down a few years ago, in part because they couldn't compete with the farms who paid undocumented workers under the table. Others have already debunked your trafficking claim, but your anecdote about an all-organic dairy farm is particularly laughable. 'Dey took ar jerbs' has been debunked for decades now.[1] My mom grew up on a dairy farm in New England (I'm visiting my Grandma there in a month), and I can tell you that there's plenty of reasons that most of them are closing/consolidating, and undocumented labor isn't even top-5. > In Germany, the 2015 migrant crisis nearly brought the far-right "Alternativ für Deutschland" into power. That crisis only abated once the Balkan states took it upon themselves to secure the E.U.'s southern border. Wait, the migrants and open borders are to blame for xenophobia? You do well to point out that Bush supported the DREAM act and take about as wrong a lesson from that as you possibly could. The lesson is not 'give the xenophobes a compromise to get slightly-more-sane immigration policies', it's that the rise in ultra-right wing nationalism/xenophobia around the world in the last decade should be the real thing keeping people up at night, not some imagined migrant 'invasion'. [1]https://contexts.org/articles/the-economics-of-migration/ https://contexts.org/articles/the-economics-of-migration/

_iyig 7y ago
Your article leaves out a lot, and you present a false consensus. Here are some counterpoints: "Illegal immigration to the United States in recent decades has tended to depress both wages and employment rates for low-skilled American citizens, a disproportionate number of whom are black men." This would seem to contradict your statement that, "Restrictive borders disproportionately harm the poor." https://www.usccr.gov/pubs/docs/IllegImmig_10-14-10_430pm.pdf https://www.usccr.gov/pubs/docs/IllegImmig_10-14-10_430pm.pd... "Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable. The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually. According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year." "But that’s only one side of the story. Somebody’s lower wage is always somebody else’s higher profit. In this case, immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer. And the additional profits are so large that the economic pie accruing to all natives actually grows. I estimate the current “immigration surplus”—the net increase in the total wealth of the native population—to be about$50 billion annually. But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year." tl;dr Low-skilled citizens are still hurt, and the "bigger economic pie" from illegal immigration turns out to mainly be due to wealth concentration and bad statistics. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinton-immigration-economy-unemployment-jobs-214216 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinto... >Wait, the migrants and open borders are to blame for xenophobia? No, lots of people in Germany are worried about mass-migration because... you know, just read my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20957989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20957989

Faark 7y ago

> We've seen what happens when other countries adopt wholesale open borders policies. [..AfD] You make it sound like there was an actual negative impacts. I haven't seen much "horrible" data on that front. It certainly gives ammo to fearmongers, but how does this make it a less good goal to strive for?

_iyig 7y ago
You mean besides the mass sexual violence in Cologne, the Berlin Christmas market attack, or the fact that migrants in Germany are disproportionately more likely to commit violent crimes [0][1][2]? What really gets me is headlines like “German far-right capitalizes on migrant crimes,” as if those politicians were happy the crimes had been committed or consented to the policy decisions that led to them occurring. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-germany-crime/violent-crime-rises-in-germany-and-is-attributed-to-refugees-idUSKBN1ES16J https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-germany-c... [1] https://www.thelocal.de/20190415/german-far-right-capitalizes-on-migrant-crimes-in-eu-elections-campaign https://www.thelocal.de/20190415/german-far-right-capitalize... [2] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/germans-shaken-by-series-of-violent-immigrant-attacks-1.3952832 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/germans-shaken-...
- neotek 7y ago
  None of your links support your claim that migrants are more likely to commit violent crimes, in fact they present evidence that dispels that (very obvious) lie. They also point out that the far-right groups that are spreading this propaganda as a means to promote their racist agenda are lying: >But it turned out, several cases did not take place in Europe, and, with the exception of one case, there is no evidence supporting the claim that the perpetrators were migrants or Muslims. Very disingenuous, but nothing out of the ordinary for bigoted organisations that exist only to diminish humanity.
  - _iyig 7y ago
    Well, you're lying. Might be impolite to mention, but I don't know what else to say. First link, Reuters: "Violent crime rose by about 10 percent in 2015 and 2016, a study showed. It attributed more than 90 percent of that to young male refugees." Second link, The Local: "Police statistics show that 38.6 percent of violent crimes were committed by foreigners in 2018" (Ethnic Germans make up 76% of the population) Third link is there to illustrate specific cases. In case you remain unconvinced, even the BBC is with me on this, with a much more detailed statistical breakdown: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45419466 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45419466 Groups like AfD thrive when people like you make assertions that are so easily disproven. They screenshot comments like yours and photoshop them next to the type of articles and headlines that I linked. Unfortunately, such images make effective recruitment tools.

darksaints 7y ago

> At the same time, their rural community has been decimated by the opioid crisis. Most fentanyl in the U.S. comes in via the unsecured border with Mexico [0]. Pretend you are a border control officer and your sole objective is to stop illegal drugs from entering our borders. What situation would you rather have: a) Thousands of peaceful people jumping the border in pickup trucks intermixed with a handful of drug smugglers and gang members. or b) Thousands of peaceful people lining up at a border checkpoint or consulate, with a handful of drug smugglers and gang members jumping the border in pickup trucks. You should try legalizing more immigration. It gives us more control over the process and more selectivity and enforcement capability, not less.

_iyig 7y ago
And wouldn’t it be great if some company - say, Anduril - built the tech to catch those drug smugglers and gang members?

aledalgrande 7y ago

Radical idea: why not giving a legal path to whoever wants to enter instead? Illegal work would become much less frequent and convenient and business owners would be forced to pay a fair wage to these now documented immigrants or get sued. Then you would not have any more unfair competition.