Hacker News Reader

Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

Not everyone needs mass immigration. Countries with high living standards and low birth rates do.

> Not everyone needs mass immigration. Countries with high living standards and low birth rates do.

An obvious alternative would be adopting policies to raise the domestic birthrate to the population replacement rate, e.g. increasing the child tax credit, and various policies to disconnect housing costs from school quality so that prospective parents don't change course when they see how much more it costs to buy a house in a good school district.

I have trouble squaring this logic with the common wisdom that millions of jobs are at risk due to automation.

Both situations can be true.

Automation hits some industries harder than others. It's barely affected restaurant workers, for example, but has decimated mining labor.

Another recent example is processing meat. The US has a shortage of labor, but robots can't do the work and Americans refuse to.

Further reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alabama_HB_56#Impact

Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan fit this description but don't rely on mass immigration.

Japan at least is in the midst of an ever-worsening demographic crisis.

"As the revised Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act enacted last December took effect in April, the government set in motion a newly created visa status designed to admit foreign workers with certain skills or knowledge to make up for a serious domestic workforce shortage."

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2019/06/26/commentary/j...

Taiwan is trying to promote more immigration and their economy has been in the doldrums for the past decade, at least when it comes to pay.

https://topics.amcham.com.tw/2018/11/taiwan-embraces-southea...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphjennings/2018/03/19/taiwan...

No one needs mass immigration. Especially those with high living standards and "low" birth rates. The position you're taking is an outright lie and I can't fathom why it's constantly being perpetuated.

Do you have any reasons or facts you can give for this?

If birth rates are low, how does your economy function with many older workers who can't/won't do labor like construction?

Why is Japan opening itself up for immigration specifically to fill jobs? What other solution should they have chosen?

You obviously downscale the economy with a population that doesn't sustain or require growth.

Not sure I understand what downscale means. How can a capitalist economy convert itself (even a small part of it) to one that doesn't require growth?

Do you have a concrete policy proposal for a country like today's Japan?

if you don't understand what it means to downscale production I can't help you. Capitalism doesn't depend on infinite growth.

I was worried that by "downscale" you meant to let people die, so I had to clarify.

As far as the claim that capitalism doesn't require infinite growth: that doesn't seem mathematically possible, ans it's certainly an unorthodox claim. I'd say that puts the burden on you to provide evidence (or, at the very least, explain).

It's disturbing that the first thing you admitted to thinking of when I said "downsizing" was letting people die. What the heck?

the basics of econ, growth isn't even mentioned when it comes to capitalism.

Here: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com