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Comment by HankStallone | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, the open borders folks like to paint a rosy picture of, "If we let a bunch of people come here and work cheap, it'll make things better back in their homelands too as they take their training and wages back sometimes." But if that's true, pretty soon they won't have any reason to come here and work cheap, and then the reason the bosses wanted them in the first place is gone.

I don't think they really expect that to happen (and we can observe that it hasn't); it's just a sales pitch.

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> open borders folks

i don't mean to sound pithy, but some "open borders folks" just fundamentally disagree with the concept of borders (and usually, by extension, the monopoly of violence employed at those borders), regardless of economics.

That does sound like bad news for exploiters, but it sounds like a good thing for people who actually want people to be better off. If open borders means people come, work for cheap, improve their homelands, and eventually stop coming, that sounds like a win-win to me. Are you sure some of the open borders folks aren't thinking like that?

The issue here is that nowhere is the wellbeing of the low income natives considered.

Is it not considered, or do they just disagree on the effects? The open borders advocacy I've seen is based on it being good for everyone.

If rich countries' sustanibility depends on poor countries staying poor, it creates a huge incentive for the rich countries to destablize the poor countries and keep them poor.

Just like the US once destablized its southern neighbors to keep them exporting cheap fruits, if the only thing that keeps the US's pension system from exploding is cheap workers from the neighbors, it'd want them to keep exporting cheap labor.

Of course one might argue rich countries will do that anyway so it's not a concern. It's just icing on a poisoned cake.

So what to you is the alternative better interpretation; that they continue in destitute poverty?

As total fertility rate continues to rapidly decline due to educated, empowered women having less kids or no kids, wages will rise globally due to reduced labor supply as prime working labor force cohort compresses. To get to that point, domestic economies with surplus labor need to be stoked with investment (Africa and India) to maximize economic potential until the labor supply constraint is reached.

The Great Demographic Reversal Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6 | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6

https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe...

https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-dep...

https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/spring/summer-2018/demogra...

https://www.bis.org/events/conf160624/goodhart_presentation....

Why do people have enormous amounts of children when they live in destitute poverty, and why is that the responsibility of somebody else to fix?

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