Comment by worstspotgain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by worstspotgain | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not going to comment on the article because most electively-undertaken fiscal projections are colored with the theories harbored by the authors.

However, I'd like to point out that the budget hawks of yesteryear (Reagan, Simpson, McCain) were at least logically consistent in that they were pro-immigration.

Immigration's positive impact on US fiscal policy is so large that not even right-wing think-tanks can refute it. [1] It raises the fraction of the population currently in the labor force. As a separate, compounded effect, the average immigrant contributes more to the social services pot than they draw out. The bonus to Social Security is even larger because of the undocumented population, which pays payroll taxes but is ineligible for retirement benefits. This effectively foots the bill for 2-3 million American retirees. [2]

So when today's populists peddle nativism while posing as budget hawks, it really fits in nicely with the rest of their bill of goods.

[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/fiscal-impact-immigration-united-s...

[2] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/improving-lives-str...

> However, I'd like to point out that the budget hawks of yesteryear (Reagan, Simpson, McCain) were at least logically consistent in that they were pro-immigration.

Being pro immigration does not mean you’re pro illegal immigration.

> The bonus to Social Security is even larger because of the undocumented population, which pays payroll taxes but is ineligible for retirement benefits. This effectively foots the bill for 2-3 million American retirees.

If they don’t have social security numbers, they’re not paying payroll taxes.

There's a very simple fix to both issues you raise, change the immigration system to allow more legal immigration.

We write the rules on what is and isn't legal. Writing the rules and then using them to say immigration is great unless it's illegal is very circular logic.

Yes, as written that is circular. I believe it is shorthand for legal immigration << actual immigration (legal + illegal) and that people in favor of "legal immigration" are in favor of much lower, selective immigration.

I do not see a logical flaw in this stance.

> Being pro immigration does not mean you’re pro illegal immigration.

This distinction is mostly out the window with today's populists, see e.g. repealing jus soli and all the other racist dogwhistles.

> If they don’t have social security numbers, they’re not paying payroll taxes.

They're using SSNs, often false or not their own. Read about the Earnings Suspense File at the SSA in the second link I posted.

> This distinction is mostly out the window with today's populists, see e.g. repealing jus soli and all the other racist dogwhistles.

There are already some limitations on birthright citizenship, for example we do not grant it to children born to diplomats visiting the USA. It's not an unreasonable position to limit it to legal immigrants.

Foreign embassies are considered US soil for jurisdictional purposes. If an army forced their way in to an embassy so that their pregnant battalion could deliver their babies within the embassy, should they get citizenship? If it doesn't apply to the embassy, how about if they do the same thing to a small island controlled by the USA or even the southern USA border?

> There are already some limitations on birthright citizenship, for example we do not grant it to children born to diplomats visiting the USA.

That's largely because the US is a signatory of the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations. Children of foreign diplomats born in the United States are not automatically granted citizenship because they are not considered subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

You're right, I can picture this. A pregnant battalion of the Mexican army breaches the border and invades the US to give birth, 18 years later the kids are employed cleaning American bathrooms. Mexico wins and America is not great once again.

> ...repealing jus soli and all the other racist dogwhistles.

Australia did the exact thing. Switch from Jus Soli to Jus Sanguinis. Some Jus Sanguinis countries have switched to some hybrid system that allows legal immigrants to get citizenship at birth.

Australia also has Vegemite and the Sydney funnel web spider. No desire to imitate those either.

There's no reason to punish US-born babies just because their parents committed a misdemeanor jumping the border fence. If they're born here and grow up here they're as American as anybody else, descendants of the Mayflower border-jumpers included.

To undertake the process of a constitutional amendment just to deny them that is one of the most racist policies being debated in this country since Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era.

Make jumping the fence a felony then?

Yes, this and also just prevent the fence jumping in the first place. It's not an intractable problem, we do have the means to secure our borders.

Deport the children of felons? Ok but the only country willing to take Eric has frigid winters. He might not make it.

Legal immigration has already been reduced to almost nothing anyway.

> If an army forced their way in to an embassy so that their pregnant battalion

Most people prefer to live in the real world rather then in absurdist fantasy land.

Absurdist fantasies are to prove a point that some limits exist. The question then becomes what said limits are.

That limits exist is usually not that interesting to point out. Nothing is unlimited. It doesn't usually matter that much for practical policy.

But it doesn't matter anyway because heat death of the universe.

This verbiage is just muddying the waters. When people say they're in favor of "legal immigration" we generally don't mean that we're fine providing a legal fig-leaf to the record high illegal immigration levels that we're seeing today.

We mean that we're fine with the rate of immigration that as a country we've agreed that we're okay with (i.e. "legal immigration") and that it isn't okay to ignore these compromises and just let in anyone who shows up.

> record high illegal immigration levels that we're seeing today

As of 2022, the undocumented population was still about 10% below its 2007 peak. [1] The population of the US grew by 11% over the same period, so as a fraction it's well below the recent maximum.

Some of the statistics at the border increased massively in recent years because a lot of immigrants are now turning themselves in as refugees. [2] This allows them to "ride the disfunction" in the backlogged immigration courts, granting them legal work authorization and deportation protection in the meantime. If we fixed the disfunction, they would just stop turning themselves in once again.

The level we've "agreed that we're okay with" is far from set. Every time we've tried to set it in recent years [3], restrictionists like you have spared no tactic to gum up the works. That's because you figured (correctly) that the level of legal immigration that we would compromise upon is higher than the level we currently have.

Restrictionists are the primary reason we have a vast underclass of semi-serfs.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-k...

[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/asylum-applicatio...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Security,_Economic_Oppo...

>the [legal] levels ...are far from set

They are set. You appear to not like those levels, but they are well defined. Movements to change those levels are also fine, but again, legal immigration paths are well defined.

>restrictionists like you

We have a system by which we make these decisions as a society (i.e. the federal government). That system has not materially changed immigration recently. That isn't "gumming up the works" that's the system working as designed.

>Restrictionists are the primary reason we have a vast underclass of semi-serfs.

No. We have a underclass of semi-serfs because we have systematically and for decades chosen to turn a blind eye to (or actively encouraged) illegal immigration. We could enforce laws as they exist today and not have this human exploitation.

> They are set. You appear to not like those levels, but they are well defined

> We could enforce laws as they exist today

You can't have it both ways, either the system is broken or it isn't. You don't want to fix it because the overall level would increase. So you push for "enforcement," but that does nothing to address e.g. the asylum claims situation. The system cannot be fixed without updating the law.

The immigration system has been broken for more than a generation. There have been large majorities in favor of reforming it for almost as long. Doing nothing in this context is not how the system is supposed to work. It's actually amazing how a narrow-but-loud minority of visceral racists has managed to gum up the works for so long.

I'm completely unbothered by the implied accusations of racism (e.g. "only racists oppose my position. You oppose my position. The remainder of the problem is left as an exercise to the reader.") and it shows that you're increasingly unable to justify your stance.

>you can't have it both ways

We have a system of government and that through that system we've defined legal immigration. That system is no longer being enforced, which is less of a system-problem and more of a meta-problem. I don't have any solutions to the meta-problem[1], but it is self-evident to me that even if we have immigration reform the system won't work if those who are sworn to uphold it neglect to do their part (that is, if there is a meta-problem, no within-system solutions will work).

[1] I hope it will work itself out in the polls but I guess we'll see

> it shows that you're increasingly unable to justify your stance.

Funnily I'm making the same claim about you.

> the system won't work if those who are sworn to uphold it neglect to do their part

As is, the system is only serving the interests of the restrictionist minority. The situation is similar to where marijuana enforcement was a decade ago, and LGBTQ rights a decade before that. Many states have had to make-do with the situation and ended up building their own mini-immigration systems.

If this is the context in which someone is thinking "gee, but I'd really like to get millions of people deported and lock the rest out, how can I accomplish that?", well, it's just possible that perhaps they haven't come to terms with the reason why. They can call a spade a spade if and when they're ready.

> repealing jus soli and all the other racist dogwhistles

What exactly is racist about being against jus soli?

Personally, I think birthright citizenship solves more problems than it causes but I also see the arguments against it.

Most countries in Africa, Europe, and Asia don't have it.

None of the Nordic countries have it - are they racist? I thought those were the countries everyone says we should try and be more like?

> What exactly is racist about being against jus soli?

Pretty much everything?

If some new country like South Sudan was picking a rule from scratch, one could perhaps convincingly claim to be against jus soli for reasons other than racism. But to push for a constitutional amendment to deny citizenship to babies that are American in every way betrays the obvious reason for doing so. It just doesn't fool anyone.

Yeah, I'm not really convinced.

Just sounds like you feel very strongly about this and want to say "everyone who disagrees with me is racist".

The majority of the world's population lives in countries that don't do birthright citizenship.

Jus Soli definitely gets abused. Cheap international flights didn't exist in 1866 when birthright citizenship became part of US law.

I could see merit in amending those laws, perhaps not abolishing it but maybe tightening it to only apply to children of legal residents or something like that. That's a system that many countries use, including progressive European states.

Trying to put motivations out of bounds over whether something is racist or not has historically been the core tactic in the bigot's playbook. We're all in favor of voters being literate, aren't we?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test

The argument that a rule is color-blind on paper doesn't make systems that are incredibly racist any less so.

Don't see how that's relevant. Other laws were racist, therefore a law removing Jus Soli would be racist?

The literacy test was a law that was colorblind on paper but that furthered a racist outcome in practice, which is why it was passed by bigots.

The jus soli repeal is a constitutional amendment that's colorblind on paper but that furthers a racist outcome in practice, which is why it's being promoted by bigots.

>This distinction is mostly out the window with today's populists, see e.g. repealing jus soli and all the other racist dogwhistles.

your enemies aren't all dumb. the smart ones aren't likely to talk to you based on your attitudes towards them.

> Being pro immigration does not mean you’re pro illegal immigration.

I can't really know what anyone believes in their heart, but I doubt that the oligarchs who extol the free market (including the market for labor) really care about any of the demographic details of those they would employee as long as they produce as expected.

Fake and reused social security numbers work just fine for withholding. Most companies are not doing E-Verify. The companies profiting from illegal labor are working with the system as designed.

If immigrants are unskilled the productivity per capita decreases which lowers effective wealth, this is a minor effect compared to a housing policy that assumes no immigration and ends up screwing the young and increasing the wealth of the elderly.

That's not how productivity works. In fact it's the other way around for the native born: to make X widgets it takes 1 CEO, 1000 middle managers, 10000 white-collar workers and 30000 blue-collar workers. If you bring in 30000 new immigrant blue-collar workers, you allow 11001 native workers to move up the ladder.

As for housing, it's screwed because of land-use policies that intentionally strangle supply to artificially inflate property values, such as suppressive zoning. If there was less demand the cartel would just restrict supply further.

I should have mentioned the productivity accounting for entitlements. Assuming little to no entitlements, your analysis makes sense.

The Cato paper linked above measured the net per-capita fiscal impact on the government. The receipts/outlays ratio for 2018 is 1.427 for immigrants and 0.757 for 3rd-generation natives.

People who advocate for enforcing current, on-the-books laws on immigration are dog-whistle racists, but advocating for an underclass of laborers without regard to their ability to function effectively in society (due to the legal status) is somehow not racist?

Legal or not, this is the "homo economicus" view of humanity. Working-class Americans don't suddenly become CEOs, Middle managers, and white-collar professionals because we import more working class. If that was the case, the Rust Belt and Appalachia would be booming.

What actually happens is that the price of working-class labor decreases (due to more supply) and the higher classes make more money off the under-classes, leading to increased wealth inequality. Which is exactly what we've observed for the last 40-years.

The only reason you would claim they can't "function effectively due to legal status" is that they don't have the status. But they actually do function anyway, and it follows they would function even better with status. Duh.

They happen to enter at the least-educated, often unskilled level. This necessarily pushes everyone else up. A CFO that strives to be CEO but couldn't cut it yesterday does today, a director becomes CFO, and so on. This is not rocket science, especially for HN.

When you deliberately fail to appreciate direct logical consequences like this, your unbridled disdain for them is showing through. The same is true when you dismiss the countless economic studies that have proven that the overall benefits of immigration exceed the costs to a narrow segment of the labor market.

There are very few natives interested in cleaning bathrooms and picking vegetables. They haven't given up on their dream bathroom-cleaning jobs - quite the contrary. They have been able to pursue better jobs because there were immigrants willing to clean bathrooms. Those immigrants created demand for all other products. The table becomes bigger, and everyone scoots over. Again, not rocket science.

Something visceral gets activated about this issue, which is why it's ripe for populist con-men to ride it, logic and reason be damned.

You've made a toy model of human economic activity and while I have no doubt you are internally consistent about the rules in your model, that model has no bearing on how human society and economic activity actually work.

e.g. In real life, 1 blue collar worker does not get promoted to a white collar job for every 1000 blue collar workers that enter the labor pool after them.

In real life, that's actually how the dust settles. The implications of how the economy operates are not on written on a "log of promotions" anywhere. Rather, the system of wages and prices adjusts as needed until people are employed consistently with production functions. If the functions imply we don't need 1100 middle managers, people change jobs and make different education decisions until there are ~1000. There are attritions and transaction costs in the short term, but they cancel out in the medium run.

I understand this is inconveniently at odds with your visceral disdain for immigrants, but that's how the law of large numbers shakes out.

The data does not support your position.

>they cancel out in the medium run

If this were true we'd see wages keeping pace with productivity. We'd also see wealth inequality remain constant. The US is famous for neither of those things being true. Your toy model of US economic activity is flawed with respect to real life.

> If this were true we'd see wages keeping pace with productivity. We'd also see wealth inequality remain constant.

These are macroeconomic variables that are affected by many factors. The production function argument I made is strictly microeconomic and independent of these.

If immigrants are unskilled and there isn't work for them to do (which is not the case), then the solution is to train them into skilled labor we need.

Ignoring xenophobia based justifications against immigration, the only reason why the right wing has a major push against immigration is because unskilled illegal immigrant labor is better for businesses than unskilled legal immigrant labor.

Illegal immigrants can be paid below minimum wage and without proper tax or benefits contributions (forcing the immigrant to bare the company's tax cost if they want to actually be squared away with the IRS). Illegal immigrants also don't know their rights and/or are afraid of reporting issues to the DOL or OSHA out of fear of deportation (despite deportation protections for whistleblower immigrants). Illegal immigrants are also less likely to unionize because if they "make trouble" the company can just threaten to report them to ICE.

All in all illegal immigration is an exploitative relationship that overwhelmingly benefits the people and companies that most aggressively rally against it.

If you eliminate this exploitative arrangement and provide an easy safe path for immigrants to engage with the labor market, most of this lowering of effective wealth that occurs for workers goes away.

> this is a minor effect compared to a housing policy that assumes no immigration

Given that unskilled immigrant labor is predominantly seasonal migrant labor, this really isn't as much of an issue as you'd assume. And the solution to this is again opening up the legal immigration path and adjusting policy decisions to reflect that.

Overwhelmingly the costs associated with immigration are costs associated with illegal immigration and they are predominantly self-inflicted in an attempt to optimize profits for the capital owning class.

Thanks for the response, I would add that Canada has found that not planning for housing for mass migration has affected their housing market (which increases wealth of the elderly and decreases wealth of the youth):

https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7080376

I've read your comment a couple times and can't make sense of it, so please let me know if I've arrived at an interpretation that doesn't represent your intent...

I agree that illegal immigration is highly exploitative. I disagree that it most benefits the people who are most vocally against it. Since you just assert this without presenting your logic, I reject it on similar grounds.

You also conflate seasonal labor with housing. Seasonal laborers need a place to live all year around, not just when/where they're employed.

The rest is just word salad solutions "adjust policy decisions to reflect that..." and "optimizing for the capital owning class".

aren't you sorta talking besides the point? I don't see how immigration less or more reduces government debt meaningfully. I understand paying for social security (SS) is a decent fraction of the debt load for the US but solving SS does not plug the holes.

if I'm generous with your proposal; wouldn't you still find immigrants applying for citizenship and eventually pulling from SS? most immigrants are younger and we should both be able to agree, they'd likely want to stay if they could.

I feel like your biases are coming through with a lot of this, the answer to our debt problems will not factor heavily with immigration.

Outsized productive outcomes have been heavily immigrant created historically.

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