6 ms·

The growth of a welfare system seems like the major change. How does that plan interact with the welfare system? If someone is impoverished in Asia can they get

• bubblethink 9mo ago
  I've heard this argument going back to Milton Friedman, but the immigration discourse these days is quite detached from any economic concerns. Forget impoverished people; there is rabid opposition to pretty much all immigration including, for example, investor or employment categories. It's a lot more tribal than rational.
  • hikkerl 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    • disgruntledphd2 9mo ago
      > With recent legislation here in Australia Are you of Aboriginal extraction? Otherwise, I'm not sure an ethnic homeland for you would be Australia, right? This stuff is so weird, as basically all humans migrated to wherever they are now. Like, I'm pretty sure that I have Celtic, Norman, Viking and other ancestors, despite my official ancestry being Irish (and all of my last 3-4 generations being born in Ireland). Is it culture? That would seem to be what people are actually looking for, and I can definitely see the appeal, but culture is something that is generated from interaction with other members of a culture, and isn't dependent on genetics (consider how you or I might behave in OpenAI vs Anthropic vs Goldman Sachs).
      • eudamoniac 9mo ago
        Yes it is culture. The desire for an ethnostate is a proxy desire for a monoculture, somewhat easier to implement because it's easier to see someone is white than to see their behavior patterns. There are also studies that show most people have subconscious tension among other races even from the same culture, though. But the outright desire for an ethnostate or a monoculture are both politically untenable in the West. Never mind that every country we idolize, e.g. Japan, Scandinavia, are essentially that. America is not a good candidate for that for various reasons, but I see no reason that Denmark or Japan shouldn't be able to codify their ethnic makeup and adjust immigration policy accordingly. As a Korean, it is really nice to visit Korea and feel among 'my people', even though culturally I'm an American. I've heard very similar things from my white friends who move to Utah or visit Scandinavia. It's a feeling that seems to be deeply embedded in the lizard brain, to be among your tribe, identified visually and then culturally. Countries have the right to cultivate this feeling among their citizens.
        • jgwil2 9mo ago
          > Never mind that every country we idolize, e.g. Japan, Scandinavia, are essentially [ethnostates]. In Sweden 25% of the population has foreign background, in Norway 19%, in Denmark 14%. Hardly "ethnostates" at all.
          • eudamoniac 9mo ago
            Okay, but those are very recent developments to which the historical sentiment hasn't fully caught up. To the extent it has, it's via negative memetic sentiments, e.g. "Stockholm is now the rape capital of the world!" Sweden, at least, also, doesn't capture racial demographics, so we don't know the makeup of the foreign born population. Walking around Helsinki, you don't need statistics to notice the homogeny.
            • eudamoniac 9mo ago
              Didn't have time to check Norway and Denmark before, but looking now it seems most of the foreign born population is still white/European. > figures from World Population Review suggesting around 83.2% are Norwegian, and another 8.3% are other Europeans, totaling roughly 91.5% of European descent, though exact "white" percentages vary by source and definition, with estimates often placing the broader "white" or European-origin population well above 90%. Another source I found puts non-Danes in Denmark at 9%, putting their white/European percentage at 95%. For approximate parity comparison, Japan is 98% Japanese, UK is 82%, and France is 71%, all falling. Imo Norway and Denmark still qualify as ethnostates, though maybe not for much longer.
        • LexiMax 9mo ago
          > Countries have the right to cultivate this feeling among their citizens. I disagree, because what seems to always be the logical next step is "My monoculture is superior, and deserves dominion above your monoculture, which deserves eradication. And oh by the way, if you don't like our monoculture and try to escape it, we'll invade that place too." That's kind of what the "mono" in monoculture implies. Multiculturalism isn't an asset because it's the most stable form of soceity, rather it's best we've figured out when the alternative is bloodshed between warring tribes.
  • roenxi 9mo ago
    Sure. But hypothetically, if we pretend people are rational for a few minutes here, how does the Ellis Island idea interact with a functional welfare system?
    • mothballed 9mo ago
      Friedman's argument was more so to just keep them as illegals but not deport them. That way they can support the welfare system but not use it. Friedman didn't want to make them legal until the welfare system has been crushed. Of course that might require some changes to make it actually true illegals don't use state benefits. You need to cut off WIC for illegals, public schooling for illegals for instance before they will actually not be using public benefit. Also their children become legal via jus soli. The obvious down-side is that those citizens / legal residents who have the skill level of illegal immigrants (sad, but commonly true) will see their real wages depressed and more competition for the job.
    • array_key_first 9mo ago
      I would imagine more young, ambitious working age adults would help the welfare system, not hurt it. If you look globally at countries which have issues with their large social services, they're almost all mostly homogeneous and declining in population, especially among the young. Which makes sense if you sit back and think about what social services are typically offered and where the money comes from.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • rayiner 9mo ago
    High skill immigration still brings cultural change. My parents came here from Bangladesh, and while they superficially assimilated, they’re still culturally Bangladeshi. They, like virtually all the Bangladeshis and Indians I know, still overvalue formal education, undervalue risk taking, elevate familial over civic obligation, don’t value economic modesty, believe elites should rule over “the common people,” etc. And this was despite spending 35 years almost completely isolated from other Bangladeshis. Culture is very deep and not easily changed. Libertarians assign culture zero substantive value, viewing people as fungible economic actors. Like many libertarian assumptions, that one isn’t grounded in empirical observation.
    • disgruntledphd2 9mo ago
      > Culture is very deep and not easily changed. This seems somewhat incorrect to me, as people change jobs and with it, culture, basically all of the time.
      • rayiner 9mo ago
        The cultural differences between companies in a country are superficial compared to the cultural differences between countries. We have strong evidence that deeper cultural, everything from attitudes towards saving, government, and social trust, persists for generations after immigration: https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/2/rethinking-immigration https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/2/rethinking-immig... (“The authors found that forty-six percent of home-country attitudes toward trust persist in second- and fourth-generation immigrants—in the adults whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were immigrants. People from high-trust societies, like Sørensen, transmit about half of their high-trust attitudes to their descendants, and people from low-trust societies do the same with their low-trust attitudes.”). You can see this just by going around the country. Scandinavia has much higher social trust than Italy. The upper midwest, where Scandinavian immigration dominated, has higher social trust than NJ/NY, which saw mass immigration from southern Italy. These deep-seated cultural variations, in turn, have a strong impact on societal prosperity: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henrich-explores-weird-societies/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henric... (“One of the points I want to make is a lot of the big institutions we think about, like Western law or representative government, actually flow, in part, from the way people think about the world.”).
  • _DeadFred_ 9mo ago
    Man I'm ashamed that I wanted to see H1B reformed and was a part of this crowd. I want more immigration I just don't want companies able to abuse people/people be treated any different/having less rights/power than anyone else in American. I think I'm just going to be full 'open borders' now because otherwise it always ends up with trash manipulating things in racist/corporate power way.
• jeroenhd 9mo ago
  The welfare system requires a stable population pyramid and currently the US is under-reproducing for that to happen. Without some immigration, the existing welfare system will become impossible to maintain. The reality is that many rich industries are built on the backs of illegal workers. If countries would punish those who hire illegal workers more than they do the illegal workers themselves, the resulting collapse of the agricultural and food industries alone should prove that the current systems are already being held up by people who do not participate in the welfare system. The people who would've come through Ellis Island are still coming in, they're just not getting registered anymore, and the people and government have turned a blind eye so they can cheaply dismiss them when they're no longer necessary/when they need to act as a scapegoat.
  • roenxi 9mo ago
    > should prove that the current systems are already being held up by people who do not participate in the welfare system. Well, yes. If there is a pool of workers who aren't covered by the welfare system then it would work out fine to just let them migrate. Big wins for everyone. Probably works great every time it is tried. And if you're arguing that in practice there is an underclass in the US that isn't getting welfare and that works then sure, easy to see. But, and I'm just going by vague rumours from reading US political news, there seems to be a significant number of people who would want US citizens covered by a welfare system. Phrases like "Universal" and "Basic Human Right" turn up from time to time. The people arguing against offering everyone in a country general support have lost a lot of arguments in parliaments around the world since ... around the late 1800s with Bismark as I vaguely recall. It comes off as unfair and unreasonable. Frankly I imagine the US political process will start asking why undocumented migrants aren't getting welfare of some sort fairly soon if it isn't already resolved that they get something. That seems like it'd be in line with the general trends. If they are there to stay they're locals. How does all this square up with easy, formal migration? In a practical sense? Rough numbers?
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
  • 9mo ago
• Steltek 9mo ago
  There were only two requirements at Ellis Island: 1. You were free of contagious medical diseases 2. You were not in danger of "becoming a public charge" (welfare) That plan is perfectly compatible with your concerns.
  • roenxi 9mo ago
    It isn't quite that simple though - you're saying the standard is something like no danger of being a net welfare recipient. Apreche said he saw "no reason that becoming a citizen today should be any more difficult today than it was in the early 20th century". Those are different. The standard of not being likely to be a welfare recipient is a much higher standard than what was around in the early 20th century. The US federal minimum wage came in in 1933 [0] for example following work that started in the 1910s. Ellis Island migration was completely finished fairly soon after that in the 1950s after what seems to be a wind-down period [1]. I don't know my US immigration history of when they started reviewing migration in relation to welfare but it'd be a complex question and it isn't obvious that the standards that were traditionally used on Ellis Island would even guarantee that the people migrating were skilled enough to be allowed to work in the modern era. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island
• Apreche 9mo ago
  These new immigrants will work and pay taxes. And of course, taxing the rich can cover a LOT of people.
  • rayiner 9mo ago
    No, your assumption is false. Even if all those paper valuations, etc., were real money you could use to pay for school lunches today, a 100% tax on the total wealth of U.S. billionaires wouldn’t even fund the federal and state governments for a year.
    • boroboro4 9mo ago
      Total US wealth is ~170T so obviously it will be enough to cover federal and state government for a year (and more like 20 years). Even considering obvious issue of wealth going down like crazy in such hypothetical scenario in its ends this would be enough. Because in the end it’s all part of same economy.
      • rayiner 9mo ago
        That’s including everyone. The wealth of U.S. billionaires is about $8 trillion total, while the government at all levels spends about $10 trillion annually.
      • xyzzyz 9mo ago
        You missed the "total wealth of U.S. billionaires". The billionaires own a tiny fraction of total US wealth. Most of the wealth is owned by people like me, who own a house, and stocks in retirement account.
        • boroboro4 9mo ago
          My bad. However billionaires don’t own tiny part of US wealth, more like 5%-10%. And top 1% (and grandparent was talking about rich people) own 1/3 of US wealth.
• throw5t434r 9mo ago
  Most countries in Asia already have universal healthcare so they definitely would not be coming to the US for that. If anything, expats from Asia come to the US to make a higher salary to support their family back at home. They are not asking for a handout, they are asking for jobs.