Aside from racism. I mean economically/socially, what issues does too much immigration cause?
Immigration only really causes economic issues with bullshit employee specific visas like H1Bs - those visas trap immigrants in powerless positions where they’re unable to advocate for fair compensation and drive down overall wages.
Everything else is fucking bullshit xenophobia.
Would more supply of workers (even naturalized ones) not drive down wages too?
An increase in supply would reduce wages, unless it also increases demand. If you think about wages in cities vs rural areas, you’ll see that most of the time more people = more economic activity = higher wages.
Where this breaks down, is if there’s barriers of entry that prevent immigrants from participating in the economy fully. If immigrants aren’t allowed to legally work or start business (as happens with some asylum seekers or ‘illegal’ immigrants) then they are forced to compete over a small pool of off-book / cash-in-hand jobs, which could see a reduction in wages without a significant increase in overall economic activity.
Sounds like an argument for amnesty for illegals honestly. And more relaxed legal immigration pathways.
Eh, it doesn’t really seem like that tends to happen… economies are weird and if you keep adding people you tend to just get more and more service jobs.
Doesn’t sound that weird. More people means more people to serve, so more service jobs are needed.
and now you need houses for people to live in and people to make the houses, and now there’s more people and they invent things, which makes things better and more people come and there’s more farming and more people to make more things for more people and now there’s business, money, writing, laws, power,
Can we go on land yet?
But where does the extra money and infrastructure come from to provide everything they need?
More people means more mouths to feed, more strain on the limited housing market driving prices and inaccessibility up, more capacity required at hospitals, doctor’s surgeries, schools, all public services (meaning everything from more doctors, nurses, consumables, locations, etc needed), and so on.
Where does the money come from to provide for the net influx of 500,000+~ people a year, a population increase of some 0.75%?
I’m not against immigration, welcoming people from other cultures with fresh ideas and outlooks on life is great and I love it, but the strain it places immediately on our already failing societal systems, such as healthcare, education, housing availability, job availability, etc, is very real, and needs to be addressed.
more capacity required at hospitals, doctor’s surgeries, schools, all public services (meaning everything from more doctors, nurses, consumables, locations, etc needed)
So, skilled, high paying jobs? More architects, more plumbers, more software developers, more of all kinds of jobs
But where does the extra money and infrastructure come from to provide everything they need?
What is money in the first place? It represents labour and resources. So when a new person shows up, they themselves provide the money in the form of their labour. They are the money.
That money comes from taxes that rise with increased economic activity that rise with the population.
You don’t necessarily need more money, just more flow. Imagine 20 people sitting in a circle, each with a colored stone in their left hand, and $20 in their right. Everyone gives the $20 to the person on the right, and takes the colored stone. Everyone gets the stone they wanted, and everyone paid with $20. Now imagine only one person has a $20… the same exchange happens, but it goes sequentially.
Now, and I’m not advocating the removal of all fat-cats and big-wigs and promoting a cookbook here, but where things get really fucked up is you have businesses and governments inserting themselves as the intermediary in every one of those exchanges, and siphoning a little for themselves. If, in our example, the stone costs $10, and a business siphons $0.55 from each exchange, it ends up with $11, and everyone else is now at $19.45. Repeat until the business has $209, and everyone else is at $9.55… It gets even worse if the exchange is sequential, where only $20 exists to begin with. Ideally you would have a wise government who controls the money taxing and managing the overall picture, but complicated doesn’t begin to describe it. We’ve made everyone start equal in our example, and all have the exact same exchange. You can expand with different skills and services and products as you want, like imagining a coal miner and a farmer trying to be in the same circle with an oil worker and shrimp fisher.
I’m just bullshitting here, but I’d bet the US is sitting somewhere around the $11-12 mark right now. More and more people are feeling the squeeze as the companies get closer to having all the power simply by having the resources to get what they want while the people can’t afford it.
Mostly to avoid having infrastructure and social safety networks overwhelmed. Yes, you will also see wages be depressed by large-scale immigration, but that’s something that could–in theory–be controlled by strengthening unions and labor regulations. That’s not where we are though; right now, unions and labor regulations are fairly weak, and are being gutted by courts even as the NLRB tries to strengthen them.
Housing takes time to build, and good city planning is necessary to ensure that cities are sustainable rather than being sprawls. (Not many cities do that, BTW; it’s usually, “oh, we’ll just add another lane to the existing 20 lane interstate”). Given that we’re currently in a situation where there’s insufficient low- and middle-income high density housing, and few companies are willing to build any more, competition for most of the immigrants that we’re seeing–people that are trying to get away from deep economic woes–would be fierce for housing.
and few companies are willing to build any more
I don’t think this is actually true. At least in my area, developers would LOVE to build condos and apartments all over the place, but local laws are holding them back.
I suppose even in a perfectly willing area that upgrades its infrastructure to support more people, you don’t want to move people in too quickly, before that infrastructure is available. But it’s easy to see that become a self fulfilling prophecy: we don’t take immigrants because we don’t have the infrastructure, and we don’t build the infrastructure because there’s no demand for it.
I don’t think anyone wants to make a brand new condo and try to full it full of fresh immigrants that other businesses are exploiting to pay less.
They want to develop 1 set of condos they can sell for $300k+ rather than 3 sets for $100k
Yeah this is the biggest issue.
The way most housing gets built where I live it works like this: A company handles the project management, buying the land, getting the permits, hiring the builders, doing the marketing/sales etc. This costs a HUGE amount of money, which they don’t have. So these projects get designed on paper and then sold to investors. These put in a big amount of money, with the expectation of the project making money in the sales of the housing in the end. This means they can often double their entry in a couple of years, which is really good in terms of investments. As the investors want to make as much money as possible, the company designing the housing have incentives to not only make the houses as dense as possible, but also as expensive as possible. Their margins in percent are about the same no matter the house, so a more expensive house makes them more money. This leads to really big expensive homes crammed together in either high rises or plots. It’s really dumb as well since detached homes are worth more, they build homes with like 2 meter between them. The biggest issue is, only rich people can afford these homes. Even though more homes are built, the majority of people looking to buy a home can’t afford these. Homes also get sold to investors again, to rent out as the house itself appreciates in value. These expensive homes also have the effect of driving up property prices in the area, which leads to more expensive houses and higher taxes.
In the end, it’s only the rich that profit. They get the good investment projects, making them even more rich. They get to buy the expensive new homes to live in. They get to buy the homes to rent out and use as an investment vehicle.
Some places have made them build cheaper homes as well, if they want to get the permit. But it’s not enough. We need to be building practical affordable homes, but we don’t cause the people putting up the money to build stuff don’t want to.
If only we had some sort of public entity that could fund housing investments with little to no financial gain, but great gains to public support and well-being that was also in charge of controlling and permitting immigration rates so that the two could be balanced…
Yeah, immigrants would be better served by apartments
No. No, that’s not it at all.
Immigrants would be better served by unprofitable low income housing, not feeding their meager scraps to pay artificially inflated rent prices to an offshore real estate investment company.
Well duh. In fact, they’d be better served by FREE housing!
In the realm of realistic solutions, apartments.
Fun fact! My coworker pays more in rent for his apartment than I do on the mortgage of my house. Most often this is true.
I’m getting a once over by the bank, he’s getting done once over by the bank and again by his landlord, and they might not ever be different.
So how is an immigrant supposed to thrive when a foreign investment firm is profiting off them twice?
Subsidize affordable housing, tax wholesale & foreign landlords out of existence. It’s simple.
It’s a pipedream.
AFAIK, the issue around me is largely profitability. You can buy up acres if land, chop it up into 1/2ac parcels, quickly build cheap “luxury houses”, and sell them for 2-3x your costs, easily earning $200k+ per house sold (“Coming soon, from the low $400s…!”). And it’s all with fairly minimal regulation, compared to building high-density housing in existing cities. Compare and contrast that with building low- and middle-income high-density housing, where you’re going to end up managing it as apartments (probably not condos; that’s uncommon in my area); that means that you’re in the red for a larger number of years before you pay back the initial costs of construction, since the profitability comes through rents.
Maybe I’m wrong; all I can comment on is the kind of building that I’m seeing in my area, and the way that the closest city–which was originally about 90 minutes away–is now alarmingly close.
Sprawl sucks. Density is what we should be promoting.
Of course, and I agree (…even as I’m looking at buying a few hundred acres of land in a desert three hours away from any town over 1000 people…). But you’ve got a lot of incentives working against that.
The town I’m in is starting to be a suburb of the city 90 minutes away; the town wants these people, and their homes from the low $400s, because that’s more tax base; they pay property taxes that the town wouldn’t otherwise have. So my town is happy–kind of–to be part of the problem.
That’s the big issue in my area. The city and it’s lovely corporate-sucking politicians keep putting out ‘information’ about the city being “X% developed!” The only thing being developed is more strip malls and high cost houses. Everything green and natural is disappearing. It’s all single-family sprawl, with only a few super-high luxury apartments scattered about and maybe 2-3 apartment buildings that anyone on a lower budget could afford. The politicians get their greedy fingers into higher tax revenues, the developing/building corporations sit back and suck up investor money, and investors get to suck up their profits because housing is relatively scarce and the cost for properties shoots through the roof.
There’s also the carrying capacity of the area they’re emigrating to. Housing in particular is one aspect of it that’s already very very tight in most of the Western world. Even without immigration per se, this problem plays out every time a major company moves headquarters to a new city/state. Lots of new people, and a very slow to respond housing stock means surging prices. Schools and other social services also get stretched - but they’re much quicker to respond to the demand.
This might be me projecting, but I think lack of housing stock is driven by NIMBY policies intentionally restricting stock, and not by some unchangeable market force. It doesn’t have to be a limiting factor, at least not as much as at present.
When i was a kid even poor people had a 3 bedroom house on a quarter acre block. I know someone who rents the balcony of a 2 bedroom flat and shares with 7 other people., all of them are migrants or international students. Oddly enough, i live in a house that was built in a backyard. A cheap, crappy new investment property made to capitalise on the housing crisis. We’ve had more than two dozen tradesmen visit in a couple of years so i wonder how that investment’s working out. This is not progress.
In the long-term yes, but in the short-term and even medium-term, housing takes time to build, so there’s going to be a lag. During that lag, it can cause problems even without NIMBY policies.
Good point.
It can suppress wages.
Immigrants often are expected to work for less money. After all, they usually immigrate from an economically worse country, so they don’t expect to land top tier wages.
You keep filling in minimum wage jobs with an endless supply of immigrants, then there is never a worker shortage and never any incentive to raise the bar. No company needs to compete with higher wages to attract talent. In fact, it can make things worse and cause a race to the bottom… Reducing wages on existing positions until workers quit and just filling it with less skilled workers.
If the company makes products the workers can’t buy, then who buys the products?
wealthier people in other countries buy the products, is what happens now.
This is dubious. Immigration can have massive positive benefits to the target economy.
Yeah, it pumps GDP numbers up. By having more people to do work.
Not by increasing GDP per capita.
Yeah, but later that higher gdp total can be used to better serve the people.
Hahaha, or it just gets pocketed.
Immigrants are often effectively scabs. They work for less, take more abuse, that sort of thing. And It’s a lot harder to form a union when half the workers don’t even speak the same language.
They definitely need strong worker protections and a force to represent them.
In Canada it’s causing a huge housing crisis. Lots of newcomers do not have the finances for what rent is here either so end up in limbo.
Yes but that’s a side effect of this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-family_zoning
Which is also screwing over regular people and also causes you to have shittier cities with suburban sprawl, oh and those zoning laws are also racist in origin
It isn’t just housing it’s infrastructure in general. Governments are happy to bring in more bodies to fill jobs and pay taxes but don’t bother to plan accordingly and infrastructure takes a long time to build leading to a lagging effect.
Hospitals, transit, housing, etc. It’s all being overwhelmed right now.
Sounds like too many landlords, not too many immigrants.
Porque no los dos?
I’m not from Canada, but because I have the natural human instinct to help people
The irony of a nation of colonial land thieves complaining about immigration …
Canadians should settle their debts with First Nations and honour their treaties, like good immigrants before judging others.
They sure should.
To add to your point…every nation stole or was stolen from someone else at some point. I always laugh at this argument. No one’s giving anything back that they were born into and didn’t literally take themselves. Are we going to find Henry the Viiis ancestors and make them answer for his barbaric ways? No. Egyptian pharaohs who enslaved countless people and god knows what else? No.
You can only laugh from a place of privilege. Please educated yourself on the Indian Act and progress with existing treaties. Your comment is at odds with the reality in Canada.
My comment just speaks the hard truth. You talking to me on the Internet is on the blood sweat and tears of someone else. Nothing is nice about anything when you go into the history of it all.
Oh dear. I’ve just seen your comment history. I don’t think we’ll be agreeing on much. Good luck.
Oh dear. I’ve just seen your comment history and I don’t care.
Who do you think the Inuit stole their land from? The seals?
Other tribes? What you think they were all just nice to each other?
There only are so many resources for them. Here in many European countries the main issue (I think) is that with the current numbers we fail to teach them all our language (it’s simply not possible without having more language teachers available, and apart from needing those teachers that also needs more money). Without knowing the language their professional development is massively hindered, causing many to remain lower class, and causing disproportionately high crime rates among certain groups.
This leads to further problems: In the big cities there already are schools where people who speak the local language are a minority (for example in a primary school near me they have two classes for each grade (1-4) for children who can’t speak German yet and one class for all grades together for German speaking children).
So guess what people do: They go to a district with less immigrants, while the districts with many immigrants keep getting more immigrants (since cost of living is low there and as pointed out earlier many struggle to leave lower class). We’re re-creating segregation. This makes it even harder for those people to leave lower class, since they have no networking opportunities but only know others from lower class instead.
Even the left wing parties are now saying that we have to reduce immigration and instead integrate immigrants better.
That’s a good point. Maybe a more even distribution of immigrants would help.
It’s a little strange to me because the US has no official language. My poor grasp of Spanish and Chinese is actually a hinderance here in California.
That’s a problem though, you can’t dictate where people live, within the country. Even if you tried, assigning them to a very expensive town, perhaps where no one knows them or speaks their language just puts them dead in the water.
Also, the US has a primary language, not a federally official language. The same issues of disadvantage occur if you can’t speak English.
Ethnic enclaves - tons of these in Canada.
It happens in any country that has immigrants.
So the reason to limit immigration is because you fail to teach them the language? How is that a reason, and not just one form of limitation?
Instead, why not ask: why not invest more into supporting integration programs? Because immigration tends to have hugely positive impacts on the target society. The only reason not to invest in it would be… 🤔 some kind of fear…
The reason is that there’s not an infinite amount of ressources. Integrating them properly works well as long as there are enough ressources, but when too many come in a too short timeframe it sadly does not work for all of them (also makes it much harder for them to get proficient at German since they can live in their own bubble and just talk in their native language).
(And we have many ressources, but we (Austria) took the most immigrants per capita of all central European countries, even significantly more than Germany which is known for having taken so many. We really are trying.)
How quickly your culture can absorb new people. If you’ve got a hundred people who are in culture a, and you integrate 100 people from culture b. Now culture a is 50/50. And it’s hard for culture a to maintain its traditional positioning.
If you want to maintain a culture, a people, a language, you need to gate how many people enter the population at any time. So that it can be absorbed.
You similar problems with militaries, how quickly they can ramp up new recruits will still maintaining their previous cadre culture.
America is a nation of immigrants so I don’t really understand this argument. Cultures don’t really integrate that way, plus assimilation is a generational thing.
A 2018 study in the American Sociological Review found that within racial groups, most immigrants to the United States had fully assimilated within a span of 20 years. Immigrants arriving in the United States after 1994 assimilate more rapidly than immigrants who arrived in previous periods.
Measuring assimilation can be difficult due to “ethnic attrition”, which refers to when descendants of migrants cease to self-identify with the nationality or ethnicity of their ancestors. This means that successful cases of assimilation will be underestimated. Research shows that ethnic attrition is sizable in Hispanic and Asian immigrant groups in the United States.
By taking ethnic attrition into account, the assimilation rate of Hispanics in the United States improves significantly. A 2016 paper challenges the view that cultural differences are necessarily an obstacle to long-run economic performance of migrants. It finds that “first generation migrants seem to be less likely to success the more culturally distant they are, but this effect vanishes as time spent in the US increases”. A 2020 study found that recent immigrants to the United States assimilated at a similar pace as historical immigrants.
The US really is a special case even within just America and really cannot be compared to today’s refugee hotspots like Europe at all. For starters, US culture is very young and mostly made up of invaders and migrants. There is very little native culture still there as it has been assimilated for hundreds of years, mostly by Europeans. On top of that, there have been heavy crackdowns on migrant cultures as well, making it anything but the organically grown culture it often claims to be. And as such I think it is a bad example of how unchecked mass migration can work because it didn’t work for the natives and it didn’t happen for the modern US. It does show that strong migration can lead to great success, though it’s still far less densely populated than Europe even now so a direct comparison is still difficult.
The economic benefits of immigration also applies to European countries, despite the racist sentiments many Europeans have towards immigrants. Additionally, the West’s destabilization of the Global South, from war and climate change, has caused the increase in people seeking asylum and immigration.
The crackdowns on migrants and the deliberate two-tier immigration system is certainly a problem, and is deliberate in order to coerce illegal immigrants into very low paying jobs with no workers rights under the threat of deportation.
Immigration was not the cause of the genocide of the Native Americans, that was due to Settler Colonialism and Dehumanization. That is not like today. Immigrants are not settler colonialist like the early Americans. Additionally, it is the US citizens who are dehumanizing Immigrants, not the other way around. Immigrants are a positive, the only negative is the reactionary violence by racist far-right domestic terrorists.
You gloss over the part where even with the best intentions imaginable European immigration would have killed 90 % of American Natives with their new pathogens. No matter which way you slice it that is a scenario where European culture becomes the dominant culture, though it would certainly be nice not to have overt genocide and oppression sprinkled on top.
(Of course that’s not the case right now and the great replacement theory is a fascist invention, if that needs saying)
Also be careful not to infantilise immigrants. There is a marginal but highly visible issue happening for example where Saudi Arabia is funding Wahhabit (i.e. highly orthodox) mosques and imams in Europe that when combined with depressed socioeconomic opportunities fuels religious antagonism/radicalism particularly amongst particularly vulnerable teenage second generation immigrants. Is it an existential threat to European hegemony or something Europe is incapable of absorbing? Certainly not. Doesn’t mean it’s an issue we have to refuse to acknowledge in the name of our own leftist orthodoxy.
The pathogens created by hundreds of years of isolation between the new and old world, due to the disproportionate access to animal husbandry, is both completely unrelated to modern immigration, and does not at all change the fact that Dehumanization and Settler Colonialism nearly eradicated native American people and erased their culture. So why bring it up? How can you consider genocide and settler Colonialism a ‘sprinkle’
What part of treating everyone as equals, including people immigrating, is ‘infantilizing’ to you? Immigrants, across the board, are responsible for less crime per capita. That is a fact.
If you’re worried about jihadist terrorism in Europe, you should look at the EUs findings. The cause is from online radicalization, not immigration.
Quote
Most of the terrorist attacks in Europe were perpetrated by home-grown terrorists, European citizens born in the EU who radicalised without even leaving Europe. Parliament proposed measures to fight radicalisation and extremism in prisons, online and through education and social inclusion already in 2015.
In December 2020, Parliament endorsed the EU Security Union strategy 2020-2025 and the new Counter-Terrorism Agenda, which aims to prevent radicalisation by providing, for example, opportunities for young people at risk and supporting the rehabilitation of radicalised prisoners.
The causes and prevention of radicalization is important to consider, such as material conditions and marginalization. But attributing the actions of those individuals who do jihadist terrorism to all Muslims or Immigrants or their culture makes no sense. They are the vast minority and in no way represent Muslims or Immigrants as a whole. Limiting or restricting immigration would not prevent that kind of radicalization. Education, preventing marginalization, and promoting awareness are the ways to address that root cause of radicalization.
Quote
However, radicalisation is rarely fuelled by ideology or religion alone. It often starts with individuals who are frustrated with their lives, society or the domestic and foreign policies of their governments. There is no single profile of someone who is likely to become involved in extremism, but people from marginalised communities and experiencing discrimination or loss of identity provide fertile ground for recruitment.
Western Europe’s involvement in conflict zones such as Afghanistan and Syria is also considered to have a radicalising effect, especially on migrant communities.
Yeah as I expected you’re projecting right wing talking points on what I said and answering those instead of anything I -at the very least- meant.
I just do not think that, in a frictionless vacuum, one can completely dismiss the idea that there can be some, however microscopic and inconsequential downsides to immigration (through no individual fault in the vast majority of the population).
Do consider that at the very least if Europe hypothetically did away with border checks entirely and strived for massive immigration, the ensuing brain drain would wreak havoc on the Global South (even worse than right now, kinda like happened within the EU with the former eastern block). Regardless of the exact mechanism, mass migration has long-lasting sociocultural impacts and to say these are only positive is pure globalist ideology.
If you have data that shows negative effects of immigration I will genuinely look into it. But yeah, I find it important to debunk right wing talking points of immigration, they are based on hysteria not fact. I don’t know what exactly you’re talking about when you say mass migration. I’m advocating to completely legalize migration and give everyone an avenue for citizenship.
Globalist? Ok, that’s some conspiracy theory nonsense.
Do you mean internationalism? Because that’s completely different
Supporters of internationalism are known as internationalists and generally believe that humans should unite across national, political, cultural, racial, or class boundaries to advance their common interests, or that governments should cooperate because their mutual long-term interests are of greater importance than their short-term disputes.
There’s something to be said for culture and tradition, which have been for a long time the cornerstones of our civilization.
Everybody has their own opinion on this of course. For me, I feel that culture and tradition are in the way of progress. At some point our current traditions, cultures and values will change, they will evolve. I’m all in for a true multicultural society if there is a clear segregation between state and religion.
The issue is though that “segregation between state and religion” is a cultural trait. It’s not something that every culture values, nor is it something that inevitably happens.
In fact, it’s almost certainly a minority opinion on a global level. Particularly in (although not exclusive to) poorer non-western countries which tend to be much more conservative and religious.
A small number of conservative immigrants won’t hugely impact views in the host country, but a sizable number (particularly if they are concentrated in certain areas) absolutely can.
Local culture always changes in time. Take Europe, it’s culture steeped and deeply influenced by Christianity in many countries. And yet Christianity is a religion with Middle East origins. People just don’t look at the bigger picture - or don’t want to. The change in the past was not happening to them, but it is now and that’s what matters.
In some ways perhaps culture and tradition do stand in the way of progress, but it’s not that clear cut.
In Australia the majority of migrants are from South East Asia, which are much more conservative politically than Australia.
For example, more migration is not going to further transgender rights.
I have a feeling that this might be true of a lot of places, just because of the nature of migration.
Poorer places tend to be more conservative, and immigrants tend to leave poorer places to go to richer places.
That was my implication, yes. Well done.
Problems start when the people coming in don’t share those sentiments and instead want their authoritarian culture to replace and dominate.
Edit: also, in the West democracy and equality have become part of our culture and tradition, for the most part, and those values just are not shared by lots of migrants. And you can’t tolerate those values being replaced. It’s the paradox of tolerance.
People downvoting you don’t realize how good we have it compared to majority of the world’s population.
Like Christianity did you mean?
That said, I don’t disagree with the sentiment - the respect should come both ways and the imigrants should respect the native culture, but that also doesn’t mean they havento give up their own.
I agree! (Also about Christianity, fuck anyone whose dogmatism causes them to disrespect any marginalized group.)
But I don’t think anyone should tolerate intolerance. If it’s part of your culture to subjugate women and hate LGBTQ people or other religions, you will have to change that part of your culture or fuck all the way off.
That’s a fair thing to be concerned about, but are we really anywhere near that level of immigration in the US? I can’t speak for European countries.
Both the US and Europe would be much nearer to that level if any migration was allowed unchecked. It is becoming a problem in Europe and it is growing. It’s just a sad reality that democracy can’t consist of people who don’t believe in democracy.
Is culture really that big of a problem? Especially for the US, which prides itself on being a melting pot of different cultures
Edit:
I’m out.
Also, you asked the question, I gave response. That’s how public discussion works.
…no shit? Weird passive aggressive comment out of nowhere
Edit: a perfect example of how bad things can be, and why you don’t want large numbers coming in without integration. https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/48b6b106-78ac-4a36-8a42-9fa62afb67f2.jpeg
What country is this?
Plus, frankly, we have enough crackpots and extremists of our own. Just letting everyone in, with no limits, you end up with even more, and that may be more than any culture can take.
Strange you think “newcomers = crackpots”. All the immigrants I’ve met have been normal, sane people. Most crackpots are born citizens. It could be that letting in immigrants will dilute the ratio of crackpots.
Doesn’t matter where they’re from, why they’re extremists, it’s a matter of numbers.
I don’t really foresee ISIS allying with the KKK. Obviously it’s not ideal to have either, but they’re working against each other as much as against society.
How many extra strict adherents can we take on without disrupting the general trend towards a kind of religious neutrality?
That’s a good question. I’d be interested in any data. I could see a religious sect taking over a government (democratically) and then using their power to enforce religion. But also, again I don’t foresee different religions working together on this, and it may be that the more different religions we throw together the more they cancel themselves out - it’s harder to believe your god is the real god when you’re surrounded by other people with different gods who also believe THEIR god is the real god.
That’s just me spitballing though, like I said I don’t really have any information one way or the other.
.
Well good thing we’re not taking in 330 million immigrants all at once then, so this will never be a problem.
You know there are other countries tries right?
A lot of european countries are only a few million people…
are European countries regularly taking in migrant populations equal to their countries population?
Why does it need to be equal to population?
I’m not saying that all immigration is bad, but rather that above a certain level it gets difficult to integrate people. For european countries this is a much lower number than the US, since populations are much lower. At the same time, there are many more refugees than in the US.
It’s a genuine challenge here in Vienna, for instance, at the moment because recent immigrants make up a large percentage of school kids, who often have few language skills, tend to be very religious, and have extremely conservative views on things like feminism and gay rights. Unfortunately, their views tend to self-reinforce rather than become milder over time due to being the majority view among their peers/in their school/community.
You can’t really blame the kids, obviously they are just a product of the culture they grew up in, however you also can’t just ignore the issue. There isn’t any mechanism for preventing immigrants groups from clustering in specific areas (and I don’t think most people would be in favor of anything that draconian)
In an ideal world, maybe there is a perfect solution, but the reality is that the current system is facing a huge challenge. Like it or not, this is directly tied to immigration rates.
Why does it need to be equal to population?
Because I was responding to the previous commenter that cited specifically those numbers.
I get what you’re saying, that other cultures are not as tolerant, and when said culture pops up in a previously tolerant area, it can cause tensions. To that I’d say that we have a system of government enforcing laws in a uniform manner across a region precisely because not everyone agrees uniformly. You can’t strip away the freedom to be wrong, you can only enforce rules that support equity, safety, and inclusion, and do so especially within local populations that seem to eschew it.
But also, not all migrants are intolerant. So assuming that they 1. are, and 2. will stay that way, is a xenophobic dog whistle.
Housing is already unsustainable, more people means more demand for it
Very good point. Having a local government that is willing to allow more housing to be built is absolutely necessary if you want to let immigrants in.
Building houses is probably generally allowed, but not an easy solution.
Someone who migrates to another country, to work there in a regular job, can get a regular apartment. But everyone wants to live where the living conditions are best. You can’t build infinite housing in those locations, and the increased demand drives prices.
Someone who seeks asylum is in an entirely different situation, and housing them is a different challenge. Building a house in a nice place costs 10x what it costs in a remote country region. But now people have nobody to integrate with and less social options.
Any house being built costs money. Building houses for people who are still in search of employment is a bad investment. Nobody wants to build those houses. They want to build the nice houses in the nice places that will gather lots of rent. If you want to have the houses anyway, because maybe the people are already here, you probably have to use taxes for it. Some citizens will never be able to accept that, creating conflict.
It’s the only non racist rationale I can think of, and potentially solvable if local governments and NIMBY laws didn’t suck so much
Housing in even semi-desirable locations is already unaffordable for most Americans. How would immigrants, considering the low wages they are limited to, make this worse?
Smaller partitions, roommates, families in single bedrooms, landlords exploiting ignorance to skirt rights and maintenance etc
It depends on the kind of immigrant. You have students, high educated workforce, people that flee from war/not safe to stay country and people that just want a (economic) better life.
I think too much of any immigration can cause maybe an issue that the majority of people are new and that the culture (how do we interact with each other, what is acceptable behavior etc) has not settled.
It’s easier for most people to believe that different coloured or dressed folk, or those that look the same but speak differently, are the reason your life is difficult. It couldn’t possibly be the people that look and sound like you that are your problem. In the UK it’s been said before that a white British guy in a factory job has more in common with a Jamaican bricklayer or a Polish chamber maid than they do with Boris Johnson. I believe that position.
Aside from racism, it is usually the belief that the new immigrants will either be economic competition for those with jobs or a drain on welfare.
That combined with a lack of available housing are the answers I see most often.
Gee, if only we could find the labor to build some extra housing. Must be that the immigrants taking our jobs just don’t want to work these days.
You also need money, materials, and space to build housing though and I doubt all immigrants are carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and all the other professionals needed to build homes.
Richest nation on earth, but only in stonks and bullets.
in my country that’s exactly what is happening, they are taking the simpler jobs for much cheaper, and lot of our “native” people has/had jobs like this.
ironically, this country is among the loudest in anti-immigration in the EU, all the while they are immigrating people from neighboring countries exactly for cheap labor.
Historically, US actually was quite welcoming of immigration, including from Mexico. It tends to ebb and flow. I was taught by an economist that typically you open the flood gates when you want the labor, while restricting it when you don’t. To him, labor works just like goods in supply/demand curves. Flooding a market can drive down value of labor, etc., which can be bad for local workers. Obviously it’s a little more complex, but that’s the jist.
The trouble is, with globalization, one must wonder if that S/D curve is still valid. I imagine it is in some sectors, but in others, those jobs have been outsourced. If this is a bigger strain on demand, then it’s better to keep immigration on lock. That would at least help explain why it’s so hostile currently, but I’m just thinking out loud. I don’t necessarily agree with the economist approach.
Flooding a market can drive down value of labor, etc., which can be bad for local workers.
That makes sense, but in the long run/bigger picture, having a bigger employable workforce results in more consumers, which means a growing economy.
I’m not well versed enough in macroeconomics to explain how to promote the economy without lowering wages, but surely it can be done. “They’re taking our jobs” just sounds way too reductive.
It actually has more to do with training and education. In developed nations, people get more education and the result is a larger void in the low skill labor force who are employed by them. Ironically, more education results in lower wages for white collar work and higher wages for blue collar work, haha. Unfortunately we rarely talk about education, economics and immigration in the same breath, so it’s rarely addressed in politics.
Automation also adds a wrinkle, as low skill labor has been automated with technology. It’s credited as one of the major contributions to the wage gap, as efficiency is a boon to the owning class, not the working class. But I digress…
From an economic perspective, it’s mostly positive. Raising a child is expensive, and those costs go on for about 20 years before you have a person that’s economically productive. Most Immigrants are adults and can join the workforce immediately. The economic costs of their childhood was paid by the country they came from. It’s a negative for the country they came from, this is refereed to as a “brain drain.” But for their new country, it’s like a tax paying worker just appeared out of nowhere.
As for the economic negatives, the big one is housing. Too much immigration all at once can result in a shortage of housing. It can also put stress on public services and infrastructure. Businesses may not have the capacity to serve a larger population. These things can adapt of course, but you can’t instantly build a house and you can’t instantly expand public services, etc. So you might want to limit immigration so an area can adapt to all of the various economic needs of a larger population. An immigrant will work and pay taxes and contribute to the local economy, so long term it’s all positives, but there can be a lot of short term problems if a population grows to rapidly.
As for social… well I’m not really much of a sociologist, but just from I can see, people who already live in an area might be uncomfortable being around people of a different culture. Might say crazy things like “They’re eating the dogs!” Yeah that’s crazy, but it is a problem. Not caused by the immigrants themselves, but it’s a problem that does happen when there’s immigration.
But there’s social benefits. Can learn from a new culture. May get some new options for restaurants to go to.
Generally the young will enjoy more social benefit (going out to the different restaurants and learning about different cultures), but the older people will tend to be uncomfortable with it. But that’s just the tendency.
So overall I’d say you do need limits on immigration to mitigate the short term issues, but it’s all positives in the long term.
In my opinion, country-based immigration paired with needs-based works really well.
Ultimately, many of the best parts of the culture of a place are because of what people brought with them years ago. Some of the best restaurants are because someone in India moved to the UK, and then moved to the US and brought the culture of Curry Mile or Brick Lane with them, or because a community of Greek railroad workers decided to set up bakeries using their known recipes that all the locals love.
The same often goes for business. Look at the rise of Aldi and Lidl, and how cheap produce and great workers rights will suddenly make local supermarkets look in bewilderment at how markets they once dominated are being torn away from them.
IMO, if you have skills to offer, you should be welcome. I’m currently in the process of moving to the US on a high-skilled visa, and it is mad how one country will require thousands in legal fees and 24+ month waits while a country next door will say “Shit, you can teach?! Come join us! If you want to stay permanently that’s fine!”
