6 ms·

As a person that leans towards socialism. I want to understand from someone who leans towards capitalism, the reluctance with immigration. We have people who wi

As a person that leans towards socialism. I want to understand from someone who leans towards capitalism, the reluctance with immigration. We have people who will travel large distances for a potential benefit (i.e risk takers), who like the articles mentioned, are happy to work hard. This is the ideal characteristics of an entrepreneur or early employee or a start-up. More labour, lowers labour costs. What is the reluctance with immigration ?

bruceb 6y ago
"lowers labour costs" So you want to drive down wages for working people? Better to take highly educated people who are going to compete against other highly educated people, not people who will compete against Americans who are less educated and who are not financially well off.
the-dude 6y ago
If you are so curious, maybe you should do some more research. I suggest visiting some suburbs of Paris, or Stockholm. Furthermore, we are already in the EU, which is a trade-block only, favoring capitalists ( and driving down labor costs ). edit: If you want hard numbers, look up the labor participation for NL.
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 6y ago
  I have visited suburbs of Paris and Stockholm several times since I have relatives who have lived there. What is your point?
tomp 6y ago
There needs to be a balance. Unlimited immigration is unsustainable (Europe can’t support 3bn people), so there have to be some limits. Also, I value my culture (not in the “food & language” sense, but in “enlightenment values” sense), and have no interest in admitting more people who don’t value or respect this culture. Finally, you need to correctly read the situation. Most pro-immigration people support it to lower labour costs. They will of course deny it and claim “humanitarian reasons”, but it was plainly obvious during Covid, with e.g. UK companies complaining that fruit is gonna rot on the fields without immigrant labour... like, have you considered hiring locals??
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 6y ago
  > Most pro-immigration people support it to lower labour costs. Do you have a source for this claim?
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  Three billion people in the current European Union would be 68 people per square km, about as dense as Mexico or Ukraine. As far as culture goes immigrants assimilate. By the third generation it’s rare to actually be able to speak the language of their ancestors. Catholic immigrants to the US were feared as agents of Rome. Now the average American Catholic has a Protestant conception of what religion is, they’re so mixed in. Or look at Asian Americans. From the point of view of someone living in China the idea that people actually identify with this is more than a little absurd. It’s like white. This identity has no purchase in the emigrant sending countries. In the end without continuing immigration all ethnic communities that are not closed to intermarriage dissolve. As far as humanitarian reasons go for opposing immigration controls see Fabio Rojas or Bryan Caplan. We exist.
  - sofixa 6y ago
    It depends. In France, most of the terrorist attacks were committed and planned by radicalised first or second generation "immigrants"(or descendents thereof). They don't feel French, they don't feel like the origin of their parents/etc. so they pick religion.
  - travisoneill1 6y ago
    Just because it's theoretically possible to fit 3bn people in Europe doesn't mean the Europeans should want to do it.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  > Unlimited immigration is unsustainable (Europe can’t support 3bn people), so there have to be some limits. If it were just about population, why is there no concern with natural population rise due to birth rates? > Also, I value my culture (not in the “food & language” sense, but in “enlightenment values” sense), and have no interest in admitting more people who don’t value or respect this culture. Surely then it would be possible to institute a "cultural test" where people who do agree with "enlightenment values" are free to immigrate. I also think it is incredibly questionable for europe to lay claim to "enlightenment values", as if those are a single unified system of values that belongs solely to europe and is matched by modern european states.
pseudo0 6y ago
Low-skill immigration, like the shop workers and cleaners cited in the article, is an example of private industry obtaining a small benefit (lower wages) at the cost of a significantly larger externality imposed on the government and society as a whole [0]. In an ideal capitalist system, these externalities would be properly factored into the cost of the outputs that use immigrant labor, likely making them uncompetitive. [0] - https://www.heritage.org/immigration/report/the-fiscal-cost-unlawful-immigrants-and-amnesty-the-us-taxpayer https://www.heritage.org/immigration/report/the-fiscal-cost-...
cpursley 6y ago
The free market libertarian position is very pro immigration (open minds, open markets, open borders) for the same reasons you mentioned. I would argue that many conservatives aren't really pro capitalism when it comes down to the details. Also, I noticed that the more socialist a country leans the more difficult it is to immigrate largely due to the potential burden that person may place on society (they require you to have skills or capital, not have certain diseases, certifications, ect).
- humanrebar 6y ago
  I'd argue that most people aren't anti-capitalist either. Capitalism is mostly about individual property rights and the implications that fall out of it. Most people who are critical of capitalism are conflating capitalism and corporatism. The essence of capitalism is hard to argue against without rejecting individual rights or currency or something similarly non-controversial and ingrained in society.
- jpxw 6y ago
  > The free market libertarian position is very pro immigration On the condition that the welfare state is minimal, though.
dmichulke 6y ago
One word: risk Countries are not reluctant to allow immigration, they are reluctant to allow immigration of potentially harmful people (as long as we're below immigration capacity) Proxies for "harmfulness" are: - different culture estimated via parent citizenship, religion, and language - less wealth, estimated by income (having a job already), income potential (education) and/or money in the bank account In general, power-hungry politicians should aim for obtaining higher populations because it means more power.
runawaybottle 6y ago
You have to look at what uncontrolled migration actually did to some parts of the world. Take a look at some of the “mega” cities in Southeast Asia, where unfettered migration to the cities lead to something unlivable. There is also a massive lack of opportunity since everyone saturates the same professions (or simply just too many people). The city might already have the right amount Rickshaw drivers, but now it’s got 10x more because of mass migration from villages to cities. Now do that across the board for everything, software, retail, etc. I won’t even mention how housing and infrastructure are impacted. This kind of unfettered pipe opening will just lead to more unemployed, higher housing prices, and so on. You have to consider these things or else you get an unlivable disaster (India, Bangladesh - just take look at their mega cities as case studies, total disasters). Oddly, a little bit of gate keeping would actually help. Everything in moderation, a little bit of open borders, a little bit of gate keeping, a little bit of everything - but not too much. Japan might be on the opposite side of things with a little too much gate keeping. We need vigilant balance (constantly reassess, and calculate the impact of a batch immigrants across say ... 30 years, and project how we need to adjust the pipeline to maintain a healthy growth/quality of life balance). I’ll tell you what I can’t stand though. I can’t stand people that minimize the logistical element of increasing the population of a region to a moral and emotional argument. If you don’t carefully consider capacity, and reduce the argument to platitudes of ‘this has always been a land of immigrants’, you will certainly fuck us by adding to already growing issues of a hyper competitive economy where people are fighting tooth and nail for unstable low wage gig jobs, competitive and costly higher education, hyper competitive knowledge industries, and of course the hyper hyper hyper fucked and competitive housing market. I want us to seriously consider why we want to add more to a pot where we are already getting cramped in a variety of ways.
humanrebar 6y ago
> I want to understand from someone who leans towards capitalism, the reluctance with immigration. They are almost entirely orthogonal. The intersection is in the relationship between "free trade" and immigration. That is, why should goods be free to trade but not labor, not that I'm advocating either way in this comment.
bumbada 6y ago
Capitalists(financial elite,landowners entrepreneurs and the politicians they buy)love immigrant workers. The less they pay, the better for them. Don't like the misery salary? Look at the queue of people looking for the job willing to work for less. It is middle and lower class workers who hate competition from low income workers. The miserable salary in the "rich" country is being rich in a poor country. It is the middle and lower class those that suffer from the higher criminal rates because they are the ones who are being stolen or their houses occupied. The rich live isolated in good places, with private security. There are additional problems like the cultural one. Islam religion demands that their believers do not integrate ever in a non Muslim society so bringing millions of them to a non Muslim society means fragmenting it over time, like in Albania or Georgia(from Europe, not the American one).
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  Isn’t the religion of Albanians Albanianism? Don’t Adjarians get along well with other Georgians? You picked the two least supportive examples for your thesis.
mam2 6y ago
As a french, mostly left wing who understand right wing people: enconomy is not the only thing. migrants can (do) bring some part of their culture that may be unwanted. Like the way they see / treat women to start with... People who want to be "nice" to migrants don't realize how bad that can be.

bruceb 6y ago

"lowers labour costs" So you want to drive down wages for working people? Better to take highly educated people who are going to compete against other highly educated people, not people who will compete against Americans who are less educated and who are not financially well off.

the-dude 6y ago

If you are so curious, maybe you should do some more research. I suggest visiting some suburbs of Paris, or Stockholm. Furthermore, we are already in the EU, which is a trade-block only, favoring capitalists ( and driving down labor costs ). edit: If you want hard numbers, look up the labor participation for NL.

tuwtuwtuwtuw 6y ago
I have visited suburbs of Paris and Stockholm several times since I have relatives who have lived there. What is your point?

tomp 6y ago

There needs to be a balance. Unlimited immigration is unsustainable (Europe can’t support 3bn people), so there have to be some limits. Also, I value my culture (not in the “food & language” sense, but in “enlightenment values” sense), and have no interest in admitting more people who don’t value or respect this culture. Finally, you need to correctly read the situation. Most pro-immigration people support it to lower labour costs. They will of course deny it and claim “humanitarian reasons”, but it was plainly obvious during Covid, with e.g. UK companies complaining that fruit is gonna rot on the fields without immigrant labour... like, have you considered hiring locals??

tuwtuwtuwtuw 6y ago
> Most pro-immigration people support it to lower labour costs. Do you have a source for this claim?
barry-cotter 6y ago
Three billion people in the current European Union would be 68 people per square km, about as dense as Mexico or Ukraine. As far as culture goes immigrants assimilate. By the third generation it’s rare to actually be able to speak the language of their ancestors. Catholic immigrants to the US were feared as agents of Rome. Now the average American Catholic has a Protestant conception of what religion is, they’re so mixed in. Or look at Asian Americans. From the point of view of someone living in China the idea that people actually identify with this is more than a little absurd. It’s like white. This identity has no purchase in the emigrant sending countries. In the end without continuing immigration all ethnic communities that are not closed to intermarriage dissolve. As far as humanitarian reasons go for opposing immigration controls see Fabio Rojas or Bryan Caplan. We exist.
- sofixa 6y ago
  It depends. In France, most of the terrorist attacks were committed and planned by radicalised first or second generation "immigrants"(or descendents thereof). They don't feel French, they don't feel like the origin of their parents/etc. so they pick religion.
- travisoneill1 6y ago
  Just because it's theoretically possible to fit 3bn people in Europe doesn't mean the Europeans should want to do it.
UncleMeat 6y ago
> Unlimited immigration is unsustainable (Europe can’t support 3bn people), so there have to be some limits. If it were just about population, why is there no concern with natural population rise due to birth rates? > Also, I value my culture (not in the “food & language” sense, but in “enlightenment values” sense), and have no interest in admitting more people who don’t value or respect this culture. Surely then it would be possible to institute a "cultural test" where people who do agree with "enlightenment values" are free to immigrate. I also think it is incredibly questionable for europe to lay claim to "enlightenment values", as if those are a single unified system of values that belongs solely to europe and is matched by modern european states.

pseudo0 6y ago

Low-skill immigration, like the shop workers and cleaners cited in the article, is an example of private industry obtaining a small benefit (lower wages) at the cost of a significantly larger externality imposed on the government and society as a whole [0]. In an ideal capitalist system, these externalities would be properly factored into the cost of the outputs that use immigrant labor, likely making them uncompetitive. [0] - https://www.heritage.org/immigration/report/the-fiscal-cost-unlawful-immigrants-and-amnesty-the-us-taxpayer https://www.heritage.org/immigration/report/the-fiscal-cost-...

cpursley 6y ago

The free market libertarian position is very pro immigration (open minds, open markets, open borders) for the same reasons you mentioned. I would argue that many conservatives aren't really pro capitalism when it comes down to the details. Also, I noticed that the more socialist a country leans the more difficult it is to immigrate largely due to the potential burden that person may place on society (they require you to have skills or capital, not have certain diseases, certifications, ect).

humanrebar 6y ago
I'd argue that most people aren't anti-capitalist either. Capitalism is mostly about individual property rights and the implications that fall out of it. Most people who are critical of capitalism are conflating capitalism and corporatism. The essence of capitalism is hard to argue against without rejecting individual rights or currency or something similarly non-controversial and ingrained in society.
jpxw 6y ago
> The free market libertarian position is very pro immigration On the condition that the welfare state is minimal, though.

dmichulke 6y ago

One word: risk Countries are not reluctant to allow immigration, they are reluctant to allow immigration of potentially harmful people (as long as we're below immigration capacity) Proxies for "harmfulness" are: - different culture estimated via parent citizenship, religion, and language - less wealth, estimated by income (having a job already), income potential (education) and/or money in the bank account In general, power-hungry politicians should aim for obtaining higher populations because it means more power.

runawaybottle 6y ago

You have to look at what uncontrolled migration actually did to some parts of the world. Take a look at some of the “mega” cities in Southeast Asia, where unfettered migration to the cities lead to something unlivable. There is also a massive lack of opportunity since everyone saturates the same professions (or simply just too many people). The city might already have the right amount Rickshaw drivers, but now it’s got 10x more because of mass migration from villages to cities. Now do that across the board for everything, software, retail, etc. I won’t even mention how housing and infrastructure are impacted. This kind of unfettered pipe opening will just lead to more unemployed, higher housing prices, and so on. You have to consider these things or else you get an unlivable disaster (India, Bangladesh - just take look at their mega cities as case studies, total disasters). Oddly, a little bit of gate keeping would actually help. Everything in moderation, a little bit of open borders, a little bit of gate keeping, a little bit of everything - but not too much. Japan might be on the opposite side of things with a little too much gate keeping. We need vigilant balance (constantly reassess, and calculate the impact of a batch immigrants across say ... 30 years, and project how we need to adjust the pipeline to maintain a healthy growth/quality of life balance). I’ll tell you what I can’t stand though. I can’t stand people that minimize the logistical element of increasing the population of a region to a moral and emotional argument. If you don’t carefully consider capacity, and reduce the argument to platitudes of ‘this has always been a land of immigrants’, you will certainly fuck us by adding to already growing issues of a hyper competitive economy where people are fighting tooth and nail for unstable low wage gig jobs, competitive and costly higher education, hyper competitive knowledge industries, and of course the hyper hyper hyper fucked and competitive housing market. I want us to seriously consider why we want to add more to a pot where we are already getting cramped in a variety of ways.

humanrebar 6y ago

> I want to understand from someone who leans towards capitalism, the reluctance with immigration. They are almost entirely orthogonal. The intersection is in the relationship between "free trade" and immigration. That is, why should goods be free to trade but not labor, not that I'm advocating either way in this comment.

bumbada 6y ago

Capitalists(financial elite,landowners entrepreneurs and the politicians they buy)love immigrant workers. The less they pay, the better for them. Don't like the misery salary? Look at the queue of people looking for the job willing to work for less. It is middle and lower class workers who hate competition from low income workers. The miserable salary in the "rich" country is being rich in a poor country. It is the middle and lower class those that suffer from the higher criminal rates because they are the ones who are being stolen or their houses occupied. The rich live isolated in good places, with private security. There are additional problems like the cultural one. Islam religion demands that their believers do not integrate ever in a non Muslim society so bringing millions of them to a non Muslim society means fragmenting it over time, like in Albania or Georgia(from Europe, not the American one).

selimthegrim 6y ago
Isn’t the religion of Albanians Albanianism? Don’t Adjarians get along well with other Georgians? You picked the two least supportive examples for your thesis.

mam2 6y ago

As a french, mostly left wing who understand right wing people: enconomy is not the only thing. migrants can (do) bring some part of their culture that may be unwanted. Like the way they see / treat women to start with... People who want to be "nice" to migrants don't realize how bad that can be.