>You were born in a nice place by sheer luck. It's unfair.

Yes, thats life? Of course where there is abundance we ought to use it to fix the unfairness. But life is unfair.

I think it comes down to where do we actually draw the line of abundance. Some feel we're well past it, enough that we shouldn't even have borders, others feel we aren't even close and ought to be quite selective of who gets to stay.

Why should a homeless person be forced to sleep on the street when you have a perfectly good couch in your living room. Yet you keep your door locked.

There's a tragedy of the commons problem. While I think there's nothing wrong with wanting to move your family from a poorer country to the US, if in theory every person who wanted to do this did do this - from every country (Latin America or otherwise) - it'd eventually become unsustainable. At least not without a huge government program to try to manage it all, which may or may not succeed. Another issue is that criminal organizations can try to exploit this for their own gain, to the detriment of all, and it can become harder and harder to detect or prevent this as the rate increases.

Perhaps we'll eventually be in a future where surplus and government and security improvements makes this much easier to manage, and then maybe more countries will start moving to a more open-borders / global union model, but that future is probably at least a century away (probably several centuries). I think we should strive for that future, but that we should also accept pragmatic reality until it happens.

And I do think we should probably increase the amount of families we currently accept every year. Especially war refugees. Totally eliminating national boundaries is very different from that, though.

If you can move anywhere then you would have many more economic migrants looking for the best benefits.

> sheer luck

Not really. Your ancestors worked hard to improve the environment you were born in. It wasn't luck that created western civilization, it was the hard work and ingenuity of the generations that came before us.

The standard counterargument is that not allowing mobility is what enabled us to have any nice places to begin with, in an "ant and grasshopper" way. Building a "nice" and affluent country is generally a multigenerational project involving plenty of individual sacrifice for the sake of a future that the sacrificing individuals will rarely themselves experience. If Norwegians knew that they all could move to any country they choose at their pleasure at all times, why would they save their oil money in a sovereign wealth fund instead of quitting work, blowing it all on blackjack and hookers right now, then taking out the greatest national credit line their country can secure to buy some more blackjack and hookers, and relocate a few 100km into Sweden once it's all used up? Knowing that the Norwegians would be thinking along those lines, what would stop the Swedes from racing to beat them onto the blackjack-and-hookers train?

Now, in reality, Norwegians and Swedes are sufficiently similar and familiar with each other that they probably would be able to predict the other's actions and jointly avoid racing to the bottom, but could you say this about, say, Germans and Egyptians, for more complex downward spirals than "burn through our assets faster than the others get to"? Add to it that the short-sighted policies that actually make the difference between successful and failed countries rarely are so straightforwardly bad as buying blackjack and hookers: more commonly, we'll be talking about economic experiments, corruption and kickbacks for interest groups, and really a handful of policies where we still can't confidently say if they were actually good for a given polity in the long run (space programmes, social programmes , infrastructure megaprojects...), but have to rely on history to naturally select for political processes that crystallise better instincts for their selection.

In less abstract terms, I think that especially many right-leaning Americans feel that Latin-American socialism gets close to being an instance of "blackjack and hookers" in the sense of the above metaphor, and in the same vein Germans feel that Levantine... sectarianism?... does. (As in, sitting down and negotiating a sustainable peace with people from other ethnic groups who might be heretics and devil-worshippers is the hardship-and-sacrifice option, whereas using any momentary advantage to enrich your friends and blow up infidels is short-term fun.)

I was wondering about this topic not long ago as well and came across this article: http://dieoff.com/page99.htm (not sure if that's the original link I saw but it is the same paper).

Basically it's about there being a curve for population size vs standard of living. We can't control the size of the population for the entire world, but a country can for themselves.

I don't really have much of an opinion on it, and can't say whether the article is bunk, but I did find it an interesting read.

Yeah, and I wasn't born to billionaires. So, we should take all the money from rich people and redistribute and become communist?

> Why should people that just happen to be born in a third world country live a shitty life with no way out

What about someone born in a Mississippi housing project where everyone around them is illiterate? Or in some rust belt slum with drug-addicted parents? What about someone simply unable to get the mental health they need so they end up living on Skid Row?

Lots of people are born into very shitty circumstances, and if we have problems taking care of American citizens I don't see how you can make the argument we need to open our borders for everyone in the world born in tough circumstances.

>>>You can't just say they have to do a revolution in their own country,

Uh, yes I can. The US exists because the population staged a rebellion. I don't find it unconscionable to expect others to undertake the same effort our forebears did to improve their situation.

>>>You were born in a nice place by sheer luck. It's unfair.

Some of us are also taller than average as well, which is directly correlated with total career earnings. Sheer luck and unfair. Outcomes will ALWAYS vary due to the inherent genetic variations and capabilities in the human population.

As I understand it, separating children from parents isn't some sort of arbitrary punishment, it's literally the only way that immigration laws can be enforced when adults are traveling with children. This is because of court decisions which say children can't be detained more than 20 days. The alternative is to just release the parents and children and tell them to show up for their court date, which they usually don't do. So if you're saying we shouldn't separate children from parents, then you're for defacto open borders.

The humanitarian crisis at the border is caused by lots of people showing up at the border, right? It seems like the only way to stop the crisis then is to get people to stop showing up at the border, and the only way to do that is to enforce immigration laws. Is there another answer?

I think you've been misinformed. The trac study is looking at people who have been here for years who have been going through the system. They show up to court at very high rates.

The "don't show up for court" people were part of a program by the EOIR (which is part of the DOJ) to expedite the cases of newly arrived family units in 10 cities. They very largely did not show up. You can read about it here:

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Asher%20Testi...

So it seems like there's something very different about these two different groups of asylum seekers.

Anyway no need for the high dudgeon about 'slanderous misinformation.'

seems a bit offtopic flamewar

I read a research finding somewhere that there are about 500million ppl who would move to US in very near future if they are allowed to move to USA.

Name one country with better-than-average standard of living that has opened its borders and thrived. There will always be a wall around something nice — either around your house, or your neighborhood, or your country.

Social safety nets, open borders, future ongoing existence of an orderly nation. Pick two.

People illegally present in the US cannot work legally. That means they work under the table and are subject to all sorts of abuse, and their presence promotes gray market/black market economies.

While I think it is unfair to deport people who have been here for decades and giving them amnesty (again, like we did in the 1980s) is a reasonable solution especially for those who were kids when they came here, I don’t have any problem with stopping new people from crossing illegally.

If we want to increase immigration we should do it the right way by raising legal quotas and allowing people to come via the visa process.

Because they impose externalities on the people around them.

What is your point? That other people are doing it too? This is whataboutism 101.