Of course that might require some changes to make it actually true illegals don't use state benefits. You need to cut off WIC for illegals, public schooling for illegals for instance before they will actually not be using public benefit. Also their children become legal via jus soli.
The obvious down-side is that those citizens / legal residents who have the skill level of illegal immigrants (sad, but commonly true) will see their real wages depressed and more competition for the job.
If you look globally at countries which have issues with their large social services, they're almost all mostly homogeneous and declining in population, especially among the young. Which makes sense if you sit back and think about what social services are typically offered and where the money comes from.
Libertarians assign culture zero substantive value, viewing people as fungible economic actors. Like many libertarian assumptions, that one isn’t grounded in empirical observation.
This seems somewhat incorrect to me, as people change jobs and with it, culture, basically all of the time.
We have strong evidence that deeper cultural, everything from attitudes towards saving, government, and social trust, persists for generations after immigration: https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/2/rethinking-immig... (“The authors found that forty-six percent of home-country attitudes toward trust persist in second- and fourth-generation immigrants—in the adults whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were immigrants. People from high-trust societies, like Sørensen, transmit about half of their high-trust attitudes to their descendants, and people from low-trust societies do the same with their low-trust attitudes.”).
You can see this just by going around the country. Scandinavia has much higher social trust than Italy. The upper midwest, where Scandinavian immigration dominated, has higher social trust than NJ/NY, which saw mass immigration from southern Italy.
These deep-seated cultural variations, in turn, have a strong impact on societal prosperity: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henric... (“One of the points I want to make is a lot of the big institutions we think about, like Western law or representative government, actually flow, in part, from the way people think about the world.”).
OK, that's interesting, I'll have to look into that book.
However, what's going on in this chart?
https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-trsic/tru...
I can see that (as you said) the Nordic countries have much more trust than Italy, and Italy, Spain and France are similar (along with a similar language and large inter-mixtures over time).
However, look at Ireland vs the UK. Basically the same genetics, an extremely similar culture (particularly given the amount of cross migration back and forth), and yet very divergent amounts of social trust (I'm sceptical of the metric here, would like to see it very density as I suspect that drives a bunch of the results).
> Think about your own life. How important is food to your family and friends as a way of social bonding? Do you think you’d be able to change that easily?
In terms of my parents/culture, not at all. It was much, much, much more about drinking alcohol rather than food. And yet, while that part is still there, there's far more emphasis on food as a socialisation tool in my generation.
Some of that is because of drink-driving laws being enforced, but some of it is definitely a cultural change which would seem to argue against your suggestion of long-term impacts due to culture.
> The cultural differences between companies in a country are superficial compared to the cultural differences between countries.
Again, I'm not convinced this is true. Like, if a company in Ireland has majority European employees but American leadership, what culture will it have?
> You can see this just by going around the country
I think that the particular outcomes of one country, predominantly founded by Europeans, tells us very little about how culture works.
According to official stats, 16% of Irish residents are citizens of other countries. Keep in mind that this number will exclude foreign nationals that got Irish citizenship through naturalization (and therefore became Irish citizens).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_population_of_the...
Most recent numbers from the UK list 16% of the population being "foreign-born". While this number may be similar to Ireland, it still counts someone as foreign born even if they became UK citizens by naturalization.
Also, consider that one of the most prominent migration sources for the UK is of Irish nationals (that can live and work in the UK even after brexit). Irish culture is not too dissimilar to UK culture (especially considering that Northern Ireland is currently part of the UK).
If anything, Ireland experienced more foreign culture immigration than the UK, not less.
Your point is invalid.
As far as I know, those born in Northern Ireland have automatic right to Irish citizenship for being born in the island of Ireland.
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/moving-country/irish-c...
> The Good Friday Agreement, which was signed between the Irish and British governments in 1998, confirmed that people born in Northern Ireland could choose to be either British or Irish citizens.
> Since 1 January 2005, if you are born in Northern Ireland, you can claim Irish citizenship if your parent (or parents) are either British or Irish citizens, or one of them has lived on the island of Ireland for at least 3 out of the 4 years immediately before your birth.
Ireland is culturally distinct from the U.K. For example, the U.K. is historically predominantly Protestant, while Ireland is historically strongly Catholic. That manifests in many ways. For example, the Anglosphere tends to have the latest gestational limits on abortion among European and European-derived countries. By contrast, abortion was illegal altogether in Ireland until recently (2018).
There is also the fact that the Irish were brutally colonized by England and Irish society developed a strong cohesiveness from that external pressure. The Bengal Famine of 1943 killed 3 million people out of a population of about 60 million. The Irish Famine, by contrast, killed 1 million people out of a population of only about 8 million. Indeed, the Irish population peaked in 1841, a few years before the start of the Great Famine and never returned to that peak.
> I think that the particular outcomes of one country, predominantly founded by Europeans, tells us very little about how culture works.
Europeans are culturally quite different from each other! For example, the Swedish practice of not feeding guests (https://www.the-independent.com/voices/swedengate-sweden-din...) would be mortifying to Americans in the southern U.S.
I want more immigration I just don't want companies able to abuse people/people be treated any different/having less rights/power than anyone else in American. I think I'm just going to be full 'open borders' now because otherwise it always ends up with trash manipulating things in racist/corporate power way.
The reality is that many rich industries are built on the backs of illegal workers. If countries would punish those who hire illegal workers more than they do the illegal workers themselves, the resulting collapse of the agricultural and food industries alone should prove that the current systems are already being held up by people who do not participate in the welfare system.
The people who would've come through Ellis Island are still coming in, they're just not getting registered anymore, and the people and government have turned a blind eye so they can cheaply dismiss them when they're no longer necessary/when they need to act as a scapegoat.
Well, yes. If there is a pool of workers who aren't covered by the welfare system then it would work out fine to just let them migrate. Big wins for everyone. Probably works great every time it is tried. And if you're arguing that in practice there is an underclass in the US that isn't getting welfare and that works then sure, easy to see.
But, and I'm just going by vague rumours from reading US political news, there seems to be a significant number of people who would want US citizens covered by a welfare system. Phrases like "Universal" and "Basic Human Right" turn up from time to time. The people arguing against offering everyone in a country general support have lost a lot of arguments in parliaments around the world since ... around the late 1800s with Bismark as I vaguely recall. It comes off as unfair and unreasonable.
Frankly I imagine the US political process will start asking why undocumented migrants aren't getting welfare of some sort fairly soon if it isn't already resolved that they get something. That seems like it'd be in line with the general trends. If they are there to stay they're locals.
How does all this square up with easy, formal migration? In a practical sense? Rough numbers?
At least the excerpt of the article you linked say that people fear that, but does not provide any numbers to say that this fear makes sense or not.
It's difficult to evaluate on others.
For example "other non-western immigrants" are net positive during their work years, but net negative in their ols age. But people typically don't become migrants in their 70s, they become migrants mostly during work years.
This chart is bad for multiple reasons. It does not separate migrants by type of visa - are they on some sort of critical skills visa? Are they undocumented? It doesn't say.
It also does not indicate the proportions. If 99% of migrants are on their working years and only 1% of migrants in their old age, then in general it is a net positive even if some are a strain on welfare.
Any evaluation on migrants that don't account for the type of migration going on is very flawed. Are we talking about refugees? engineers? medical doctors? nurses? academic researchers? low-skilled undocumented migrants?
All of those will be dramatically different in terms of how they integrate into society, how they contribute to the welfare state, how mucch they pay in the taxes, etc.
Painting it with broad strokes sound to me way too much like fear mongering.
1. You were free of contagious medical diseases
2. You were not in danger of "becoming a public charge" (welfare)
That plan is perfectly compatible with your concerns.
Those are different. The standard of not being likely to be a welfare recipient is a much higher standard than what was around in the early 20th century. The US federal minimum wage came in in 1933 [0] for example following work that started in the 1910s. Ellis Island migration was completely finished fairly soon after that in the 1950s after what seems to be a wind-down period [1]. I don't know my US immigration history of when they started reviewing migration in relation to welfare but it'd be a complex question and it isn't obvious that the standards that were traditionally used on Ellis Island would even guarantee that the people migrating were skilled enough to be allowed to work in the modern era.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...
And of course, taxing the rich can cover a LOT of people.
Even considering obvious issue of wealth going down like crazy in such hypothetical scenario in its ends this would be enough. Because in the end it’s all part of same economy.
However billionaires don’t own tiny part of US wealth, more like 5%-10%. And top 1% (and grandparent was talking about rich people) own 1/3 of US wealth.
The top 1% have a lot more, but the cutoff for that is $11 million, and that includes home equity, family farms, etc. The bulk of those people are retired professionals and small business owners. For example, 4% of 75-79 year olds are in the top 1% of wealth. These are rich people, but not the kind of rich that AOC is talking about taxing.
I’m a huge supporter of taxing upper middle class people, but we should just tax them instead of playing games about wealth. The top 5%, that is people making above $260,000 a year, have an income of $5.6 trillion a year. They only pay $1.3 trillion in income taxes. Just double that.
If anything, expats from Asia come to the US to make a higher salary to support their family back at home. They are not asking for a handout, they are asking for jobs.
People today get a 50$ plane ticket and move straight to the Bay Area.
You don't see why things need to change?
I don't think George H. W. Bush did that. Do you mean Ronald Reagan [1]?
> You don't see why things need to change?
Are you asserting that the current system of legal immigration needs to change, with an unsubstantiated example of a rare $50 dollar plane ticket as if people can easily move to the US by plane? Do those people leave behind most of their belongings, or do they instead make multiple plane trips to move them? And what about all of the paperwork and approval and unpredictable waiting [1]?
If the USA offered food and shelter security, billions would come in