Explain how unskilled illegal immigrants contribute to our success. I'm open minded but I've yet to hear anything convincing.
No one is opposed to the legal immigration of skilled workers.
And does "broadly unproductive" have a specific meaning, too?
If supply for labor goes a bit down, wages will increase a bit, and then companies will be incentivized to replace these bad jobs with automation.
Those jobs going away, and wages going up, is a good thing not a bad thing.
As few people should be doing those bad jobs as possible, and for the ones that do them, they should be paid more.
This elitist attitude that low-paid workers are "unskilled" workers is bullshit and needs to go.
Now, let's take the average farmer, orchard worker, construction worker, and then chuck them into a software job. They wouldn't know where to start and wouldn't get anywhere without the same educational basics that 99% of developers have gone through. That's not elitist, it's just reality.
So, there's a clear distinction to be made and it's not necessary to water down every word in the English language because we're afraid of hurting someone's feelings.
I wouldn't call "low-skilled" workers _unproductive_ per se, and personally think they're incredibly valuable, but economically, the cost/difficulty of replacing a "low-skilled" worker is relatively low: it's a lot easier to find a replacement farmhand than it is a replacement farmer that manages the farm itself.
A) are happy to put up with what is a luxurious salary for back home, but barely liveable locally
Or B) don't have a choice once they're in, since they practically become indentured servants
In the Netherlands, no dutchie wants to work construction for example, because immigrants from Eastern Europe often take under-the-table deals where they get paid drastically less than what a Dutchie would command, though still much higher than any job they'd get back home. The same happens everywhere.
The answer is NOT to bring the country down by mass-importing low skilled workers, but by forcing these hugely profitable companies to actually invest in the country and its citizens by paying all employees as it should.
In theory, yes, but I know a decent number of my own countrymen (Serbians) that most definitely aren't legally employed in NL, but they're still working construction. It's vile, but it is what it is. (Not them, the companies are vile for what they're doing, the workers are simply surviving however they can)
And these jobs are usually picking strawberries out in the rural sections or working for Amazon at some industrial estate that doesn't have public transit late at night.
My great grandparents came to this country as low skilled workers. I work with a second generation computer programmer whose parents came as unskilled workers. I know a guy from Guatemala who cleans houses and put his three kids through college. He just about explodes with pride when he talks about his kids.
Not everyone shares your views.
Yup. A lot the cheap fruit + veg in the EU is thanks to back-breaking work by immigrants and the farm owners breaching their human and labour rights..
Who do you think is picking the fruit in the massive green house of southern spain? Not well-paid Spaniards I'll tell you - https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalcampaigns/agricultura...
There are plenty of immigrants working under the table. And there are plenty of employers willing to hire them.
We do have it both ways.
Meanwhile the laborer was probably told all their life they don’t have what it takes, either explicitly or not, and that thinking held them back their entire life. Why try hard in school if I am “not smart”? Why try and go to college if I can’t pay for it? Why not just do what my neighbor or my uncle does that I know is possible? Many people need to be reminded that everything is possible if they aren’t dissuaded by unhelpful ideas or people.
Anyone can do anything if they believe enough..
It is a nice sentiment and I cling to it myself more often than not, because there is something soothing about it. The unfortunate reality, however, is that being forced onto thing for which I have no predisposition, is, uhh, counterproductive at best.
In short, I disagree with pre-supposition that your position requires ( we are all amorphous blobs that can be molded into whatever with sufficient amount of force ). And that is before we get to the question of whether it is even worthwhile to teach a kid with down syndrome calculus? Not possible. Worthwhile.
<< Many people need to be reminded that everything is possible if they aren’t dissuaded by unhelpful ideas or people.
No. People need to understand themselves. They need to experience their limits and then cater to their strengths and weaknesses accordingly. It is unhelpful to think that billions people on this planet are interchangeable cogs. We are not.
I am extremely unlikely to ever be like Georgi Gerganov. I simply do not believe I have the brain capacity needed.
It is fine to aspire, but I am not changing the world tomorrow.
Inappropriate dissuasion surely exists, but you don't help your case by making such claims.
It's the exact opposite. The slavery is being trapped in Cuba which the person decided to leave by their own free will to make it to America, where working a terrible factory job is going to make them ten times richer than they would have been otherwise.
Is you being uncomfortable with this idea actually more important than giving that person a shot to work himself to a normal American life within two decades and certainly for their kids?
It’s insane that the supposedly progressive faction of American politics is arguing in favor of a system that amounts to a modern version of indentured servitude and systemic violation of labor rights, all for the sake of cheaper fruit and meat.
https://www.bushcenter.org/catalyst/north-american-century/b...
This isn’t true in general and depends on the local economy and the immigrants country of origin. MENA migrants are a net loss for Germany, for example.
Even if economists agree, the money these immigrants spend lands in the pockets of rich capitalists.
The entire topic is far more nuanced than you make it out to be.
[1]: https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/demografie-...
Is this some propaganda website by Bush to promote neocon values?
This can only be true if they sustain themselves on their own work. An immigrant that does not work and only lives on subsidies can hardly be called a net positive.
Health insurance companies, for example, are a negative drain on society, yet they employ hundreds of thousands of workers, in what can only be explained as a make-work program for pointless bureaucracy.
Lots of this in the DOD as well. And the homeless program administrators, which you mentioned.
It's just not explicit welfare to the poorest of the poor and there are a few implicit steps, because otherwise it looks bad.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240111003833/https://www.econo...
In countries like the US that are good at integrating immigrants, they are a huge net positive.
Does that not fail your smell test?
EVERY immigrant?
That's exactly what we're doing (in Europe and East Asia even more so than the U.S.) by opposing skilled migration. Increasing legal skilled migration is much more critical, though other concerns such as asylum rights for those fleeing from an oppressive government or a war-ravaged country also matter quite a bit.
The welfare state did not exist in that time, so the cost of absorbing immigration was confined to acculturation. Immigrants had to quickly start generating value or perish. The incentives are radically different now and the marginal cost to society of absorbing each additional immigrant is much higher.
US government spending as a percentage of GDP remained low single digits until WW1; it is roughly 35% today.
> You gotta stop trying to fight the current
You must also remember that the natural state of everything is decay, and the natural state of mankind in particular is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". The current grinds everything down to sand. It is incumbent upon everyone to fight the current in the way that affords the greatest benefit to society.
I believe that the entropic state of human civilization is brutal authoritarianism.
Fight the current, indeed.
It's quite remarkable how effectively the citizens of the United States have managed to do that over the years. To resist the sweet, seductive lies of utopians who seek power.
I hope we're able to continue.
If they were a net gain, cities presumably wouldn't be playing hot potato with migrants by paying for one way bus tickets to "not here".
I lived under George W Bush, Rick Perry, and Greg Abbott as governors. I can tell you what distinguishes Greg Abbott from the rest of them is that Greg Abbott is an absolute piece of shit. I say that with zero embellishing. When I came home from the military there was this conspiracy theory called Jade Helm rocking Texas that a scheduled military training exercise in Texas was actually an exercise in taking peoples guns. Greg Abbott knew about and authorized the exercise, but stoked fears anyway: https://www.texastribune.org/2018/05/03/hysteria-over-jade-h...
Since then Greg has also employed barbed wire in the Rio Grand so that people crossing would get stuck in it and drown: https://www.axios.com/local/san-antonio/2023/07/22/doj-abbot...
Greg quite literally pried the Houston ISD's autonomy from them despite them completing the state mandate and progressing far better than anyone thought they would in the allotted time. Why? So he could institute a voucher system so that kids can go to private, Christian schools with state money: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/03/27/real-sto...
The man is a populist of the worst type. He takes an already bad situation, dumps fuel on it, calls it a solution, and acts none the wiser when things blow up; when they do inevitably blow up, he always has a patsy to blame. This is all to say, before I'd trust the actions of Greg Abbott and shipping people to new towns you should probably ask yourself, "What political game could Greg be playing?" and that will be closer to the truth than any rationalization you can come up with.
Stepping back a moment. We also probably shouldn't be surprised that disorganized mass immigration is causing problems. That's why Democrats generally advocate comprehensive immigration reform. Its going to be easier to absorb immigration if its happening in an orderly manner.
I’m not conservative, but sending illegal migrants directly to sanctuary cities might be the single most effective strategic political move in my lifetime. It flipped a decades old stalemate on its head practically overnight.
The economy of most major cities isn't based on the agricultural industry that most illegal immigrants work in.
Cities generally already have high housing costs and density. So a sudden population surge is going to be more difficult to manage.
Basically Abbott bussed immigrants to the places that are least setup to be able to absorb them. So it's not surprising that there are problems. That doesn't necessarily reflect on whether immigrants are a net gain once they have been absorbed into the economy.
That is not true. If no one is opposing immigration of skilled workers then why getting a visa is a lottery?
I can assure you that’s not true, but we hear the most about illegal unskilled immigration because everyone agrees on that.
If you believe that quote as I do then unskilled laborers can have intelligent children. Making to the United States is quite a test of endurance, flexability and competance so people who pass that filter are quite likely to be intelligent
>Making to the United States is quite a test of endurance, flexability and competance so people who pass that filter are quite likely to be intelligent
I doubt this is true in cases where you can literally just walk across the border.
Crossing the Darién Gap: Migrants Risk Death on the Journey to the U.S.
https://www.cfr.org/article/crossing-darien-gap-migrants-ris...
I still have to come to terms with this way of thinking but in a world of limited resources it gave something to think about.
Without immigration, U.S. population growth would be well below replacement rate. This is a growing problem throughout the entire developed world with no fair answers -- increasingly, it looks as though the next several decades of geopolitical power will be defined by which countries can attract the immigrants necessary to maintain, at minimum, some population growth.
I won't pretend that the U.S. is a race utopia. We hit just about every single branch on the way down, if I'm being honest... but most of the ethnostates currently competing for world-power status haven't even realized there's a tree that they need to be descending yet. We have a powerful edge in the coming geopolitical era as one of the most pluralistic, multicultural nations in human history. We have unmatched institutions and experience when it comes to integrating immigrants -- not to mention the incredible advantage of having a language & culture that is familiar to the majority of living humans.
In my opinion, walking back from these advantages at such a critical turning point is probably not something that the country could survive in the long-term. We either embrace our identity as the world's melting pot or we wither away as hermits.
We are living in a death cult(ure), we arent reproducing maybe for economic conditions as in most developed countries wages have compressed in real terms and people prefer to have less if none kids than to lower their lifestile below what they were born into, maybe is the anti-family culture that permeates society, seiing the nuclear family as a burden to personal fullment, woman independence, career obstacle, problem for the enviroment or the miriad of other factors.
Importing migrants is just a band aid that moves the problems of our unhealthy society few years down the line, we need to focus on our dying societies.
Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist in 2016, argued that the quantity of Asian CEOs in Silicon Valley undermined "civic society" https://web.archive.org/web/20161117164322/https://www.theve....
There absolutely are a lot of people who want to restrict legal immigration. If you deny that, you're just pretending that you're not helping them out.
Is this why I keep reading "THEY TUKK ER JERBS!!!!!!" as a knock-down argument against H1-B and other legal visas here on HN?
That being said, you do want immigrants working right? That's kinda the entire point.
The reasons for inviting them I think are a combination of disingenuous or outdated. The arguments about economic survival or humanitarian reasons just don't seem true to me anymore but that's a separate point.