US Immigration and Border Security Thread

[Graphic]

I don't take the illegal immigration debate seriously even at its most basic level. Nations are an obsolete byproduct of the age of imperialism. Nations are for fascists.

[Montmorency]

Yeah, well, it's probably like this: https://theconversation.com/limas-wa...nto-peru-53356

Just in one case they call it two communities, in the other two countries. The reasons for the divide, the nature of the divide, the ones who want the divide, all similar. It's always top-down class warfare while decrying every call for more equality as "class warfare"...

The robber barons of old now call themselves capitalists and run the government.

As for culture, that's what they tell the poor and stupid masses, "the immigrants, they have a different culture! be aware!". But their gated communities and country clubs have restricted access because they believe themselves to have a different, and better, culture than the poor people from their own country, too. And yet the poor consider them cultural peers, seemingly ignorant of the one-sidedness of that claim, yet always eager to please their masters for a job.

I think you're looking for:



(I recommend the Mongolian version)

I don't take the illegal immigration debate seriously even at its most basic level. Nations are an obsolete byproduct of the age of imperialism. Nations are for fascists.

Leave aside nations and citizenship. In the moment that there is not a single authority governing the world, how should governments regulate individuals within their jurisdiction?

One could identify as anarchist, but still recognize that government regulation is a fact of the world, so what should that look like in our time?

[spmetla]

I don't take the illegal immigration debate seriously even at its most basic level. Nations are an obsolete byproduct of the age of imperialism. Nations are for fascists.

So you're advocating for classic anarcho-liberalism or for a global government with free movement of peoples?

Merely saying that you think the current situation is stupid,wrong, or obselete is a cop out of having to actually try and find solutions. What can be done now on this issue that would be in line with your future global government or lack of government? The least you could do is expound on how the current situation would be resolved in your hypothetical world. Would people just move where ever they wanted?

I've meant too many 'anarchists' in college that really just want to be in opposition to everything and denounce government, private property, and the use of money. Please make yourself a little different from my former roommates that would complain if someone ate 'their' frozen pizza or drank 'their beer' and didn't do their share to clean and maintain the community areas such as the living room and bathroom.

@ Hussar You're a socialist right? Why aren't you on board with the older socialist/communist idea that immigration is just a tool of the capitalists to undermine the strength of trade unions and prevent reforms from ever happening? Doesn't this "reserve army of labour/Industrielle Reservearmee" prevent the achievement of socialist goals by allowing the capitalists to keep wages depressed and workers vulnerable?

[Montmorency]

@ Hussar You're a socialist right? Why aren't you on board with the older socialist/communist idea that immigration is just a tool of the capitalists to undermine the strength of trade unions and prevent reforms from ever happening? Doesn't this "reserve army of labour/Industrielle Reservearmee" prevent the achievement of socialist goals by allowing the capitalists to keep wages depressed and workers vulnerable?

I can't speak to how prevalent this position was a century ago,

http://webcache.googleusercontent.co...&ct=clnk&gl=us
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indust...s_of_the_World

(I think one of our Orgah socialists, the late Horetore, subscribed to the IWW general model)

but an international labor movement recognizes solidarity between workers, i.e. capitalists will exploit them no matter where they are, and keeping them in one place or out of another won't help the situation.

So a socialist argument would call for the removal of preconditions that permit any employer to wield immigration against labor conditions, or foment scaremongering about the social ills of immigration as right-wing agitprop. This would especially make sense in an age when capital and capitalists are fully international, governments are captured by a neoliberal consensus, and unionism and other configurations of labor power are on the retreat in most if not all contexts (all but defeated in the US).

Practically speaking then for the US, shutting out immigrant labor in manual and unskilled work or trades would not raise wages for US workers, but rather would lower consumer standards on the supply-side and either force most such employers to fully off-shoring their business, or solidifying an ultra-poor domestic workforce to maintain it here. Low standards for immigrant labor in fact shields domestic labor from the same treatment. It would be foolish to think that the absence of immigrant labor would spur the government to raise standards and protections for the whole workforce, rather than lowering them.

[a completely inoffensive name]

...

[Husar]

@ Hussar You're a socialist right? Why aren't you on board with the older socialist/communist idea that immigration is just a tool of the capitalists to undermine the strength of trade unions and prevent reforms from ever happening? Doesn't this "reserve army of labour/Industrielle Reservearmee" prevent the achievement of socialist goals by allowing the capitalists to keep wages depressed and workers vulnerable?

That is quite literally a national socialist perspective of someone who is okay with only having socialism in her or his own country while the rest of the world is not important. I'm not against the market, I'm saying if you are, too, and you don't like the way the market works at the moment (poor people come to rich countries), stop fighting the symptoms (migration) and do something about the causes (poverty, conflict, often, but not always, caused by the richer countries). It's actually quite interesting to see how the proponents of free market capitalism are usually the first ones to cry for artificial market restrictions such as closed borders, high tariffs or laws that help the creation of monopolies and oligopolies...
If capitalism really were such a win-win situation with oh so much trickle down, then the poorer countries, which mostly are capitalist now, should grow and grow and grow. Instead they send more and more poor people to the richer countreis, why is that if we're helping them grow so well? Shouldn't they be happily optimistic?

And the caveat with the perfect free market (multiple competing participants on the supply and demand side) is that it is not stable. The government has to stabilize it and if you remove all the supports in the name of freedom, it will come crashing down on you sooner or later.

[Viking]

That is quite literally a national socialist perspective of someone who is okay with only having socialism in her or his own country while the rest of the world is not important.

A pragmatist would recognise that it is easier to unite people the less that divides them. A division a long cultural lines is going to provide unnecessary noise by introducing topics, potentially quite heated, into the public debate that didn't need to be there at all (there were few or no hijab or burka debates in Western Europe a certain amount of decades ago, for natural reasons).

A lot of wealthy people are also for high immigration rates, which is not very surprising. Immigrants can provide cheap labour, and any social unrest or areas with high crime rates is unlikely to affect the places where they live, and the security of those areas they can easily boost anyway, thanks to their wealth.

do something about the causes (poverty, conflict, often, but not always, caused by the richer countries)

Yet, the migrants are highest on the agenda. Integrating them into Western welfare states is going to cost fortunes, and one of the places the extra money required to pay for this integration is likely to come from, is the budget for aid to poorer countries.

[spmetla]

That is quite literally a national socialist perspective of someone who is okay with only having socialism in her or his own country while the rest of the world is not important. I'm not against the market, I'm saying if you are, too, and you don't like the way the market works at the moment (poor people come to rich countries), stop fighting the symptoms (migration) and do something about the causes (poverty, conflict, often, but not always, caused by the richer countries). It's actually quite interesting to see how the proponents of free market capitalism are usually the first ones to cry for artificial market restrictions such as closed borders, high tariffs or laws that help the creation of monopolies and oligopolies...
If capitalism really were such a win-win situation with oh so much trickle down, then the poorer countries, which mostly are capitalist now, should grow and grow and grow. Instead they send more and more poor people to the richer countreis, why is that if we're helping them grow so well? Shouldn't they be happily optimistic?

And the caveat with the perfect free market (multiple competing participants on the supply and demand side) is that it is not stable. The government has to stabilize it and if you remove all the supports in the name of freedom, it will come crashing down on you sooner or later.

Fair enough so long as you mean lower cases national socialism and not the fascist one that was created. The term was used a lot by Karl Marx and it doesn't necessarily mean you don't care about the rest of the world, they were to be taken care of by exporting said socialism through revolution.

I agree on the difficulties of capitalism. The poorer countries are actually growing at a great pace but their institutions are weak and frankly their birth rates are far too high leading to vast unemployment. A large part of it would really be the increase of mechanization and use of robots. The biggest enemy of unskilled labor workers in the US has been these factors not foreign competition. The American south no longer needs cotton pickers. Ford Motor Company doesn't need hundreds of thousands employed in a single factory. Heavy machinery has replaced armies of manual laborers in construction and public works.
The same is true in most poor countries. Inhabitants of poor countries also have the same general hopes and dreams of success as anyone else does, toiling at thankless tasks or farming ancestral lands understandably have little appeal. There's no shortage of people in every country that see the millions made by athletes and aspire to be one as well to the detriment of studies for practical useful skills.
That's why I tried to point out that immigrant as it was a century ago doesn't make sense, the world and working world no longer work the same. Upward mobility is more and more difficult, especially so for someone hindered by language, education, and licenses/documentation.

As for the poorer countries, the instability and short tenure of their governments isn't exactly helping. Some such as Zimbabwe have tried to right past wrongs too quickly and without foresight and destroyed their status as a food exporter to the detriment of themselves most of all. Others such as in the Sahel face increasing desertification making the the usable land smaller and smaller while the population keeps growing.

All 1st world countries have problems with birth rates. It's just a fact that as people get more affluent they have less children. The easy and less offensive answer is immigration to fill those lower paying jobs that citizens are unwilling to do. Why though should this be an option, if there is unemployment there should be people that must do those jobs. As a socialist I'd expect you to want those jobs to actually pay a salary that someone would then be enticed to do said job instead of keeping that a job for the impoverished in slums to do.

If the trend of the last hundred years continues there will be fewer and fewer jobs for unskilled laborers so why would mass immigration of unskilled laborers be a good thing?
I know you and Montmorency are against any interventions at all to stabilize other countries, isn't allowing mass migration in a form intervention as well. It let's other countries delay necessary reforms in corruption, security, and education. I'd argue that the more effective way to address concerns in those countries would be to help develop industry there as well. I'm no puritan free-market capitalist so I'd think it'd be in the interest of those nations to impose tariffs on goods competing with their native agriculture and industries. All 1st world countries do the same, sometimes in the form of safety standards or quality standards but no one appreciates cheap raw materials or finished goods destroying the manufacturing and agricultural industries they have.

I think we all for the most part agree that controlled economies don't work and neither do completely free market economies. A mix of both regulation and encouragement is necessary. Sadly profit is a great incentive for innovation and improvement but the disparity between the top and bottom doesn't need to be as stark as it is in the US or gulf states for it to create innovation and improvement.
Labor is also a good in a market, allowing the dumping of too much cheap labor upsets the market balance just as too much cheap food makes growing staple crops unsustainable. It too needs to be restricted and regulated in terms of it's the ability of the state to educate and retrain the labor pool as necessary. The current mass migration of unskilled labor has created a glut the market which is stagnating wages and encourages the rapid creation of banned goods. In 1st world countries that'd be drug and sex trafficking while in 3rd world countries it's those to plus slave trafficking, and financing of terrorism.
Allowing this glut to grow even more in competition for jobs that are being more and more replaced by machines only exasperates the situation. Especially when unskilled jobs are essentially pawned off of immigrants or exported to foreign sweet shops and is in effect outsourcing being poor to other ethnicities. That in effect creates problems not just of class inequality but gets blurred into the rising racism that grows in response to this. A hundred year ago every European country had slums but they weren't racial slums, now that exporting being poor to other people is the norm you've got racial slums. Instead of addressing the concerns that create these slum conditions and endemic poverty these countries have allowed the host nation citizens easier upward mobility while tolerating a new untouchable class.

If the current trend of mechanization and robots continues there will be less and less employment availble for those in poverty so why do we encourage the growth this unskilled labor pool?
Intersting article on Japan's possible future:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion.../#.WluoH6inGHs
Why Japan’s low birth rate makes economic sense

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND – Japan’s low birth rate is often framed as the definitive crisis facing the country. A shrinking population constricts the labor force, drives economic stagnation, exacerbates elderly care costs, and eventually leads to cultural collapse. But is this actually true? I argue that Japan’s shrinking population is not all bad, and may actually present a hidden advantage to navigating this century’s artificial intelligence revolution.

To begin, I’d like to address the argument typically presented against Japan’s current demographic trends. Broadly, Japan is believed to be experiencing a collective action problem. While it may make sense for individual families to have few or no children due to monetary and temporal constraints, collectively the country as a whole should want more kids. Therefore, government policies are needed to incent childbirth — which we see implemented today with middling efficacy.

But why should Japan want more children? The obvious, direct consequence of a lower birth rate is a constricting labor supply. But fewer workers is not necessarily a bad thing. Thinning labor puts upward pressure on wages, increasing living standards and reducing unemployment. In fact, reducing the labor supply is the rationale commonly given (though arguably justified) for reducing immigration in my home country of the United States. The counterbalancing risk, of course, is that expensive labor makes Japanese products less competitive, reducing exports and shrinking GDP.

But this downside is only true if labor cannot be effectively substituted with technology. And there is very good reason to believe that not just the Japanese — but the global labor force — is due for a massive labor substitution. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation will eliminate between 30 percent to 60 percent of today’s jobs, depending on which major study you prefer. Positions like trucking, cashiering and clerking will be first to go; but even relatively skilled jobs like paralegals and analysts are predicted to be lost within two decades.

Given this massive technological shift, a reduced birth rate makes anticipatory sense. In the U.S., futurists like the firm Y-Combinator are advocating for a universal basic human income to address social instability due to spiking unemployment. But in Japan, the labor supply is preemptively thinning. The reasons behind Japan’s low birthrate may not necessarily be healthy — overly demanding jobs, lack of institutional support for families, and more — but that does not mean the outcome of these factors is wholly undesirable.

And there may be other, unanticipated benefits to a shrinking Japan. The country’s population is three times the size of California’s — packed in a significantly smaller land mass. Compounding crowding is Japan’s mountainous terrain, which covers over 70 percent of the country. Population thinning may reduce congestion in cities, render urban housing more affordable, and even ease crowding on Japan’s packed commuter trains.

Finally, a reduction in Japan’s population may ultimately catalyze necessary societal reform. Already Japan’s low birthrate is prompting limited immigration reform, making it easier for certain categories of foreigners to live and work in the country. Japan is not self-destructive; it stands to reason that if population shrinkage continues, Japan will increasingly modernize its immigration policies. Ultimately, labor market forces may incite Japan to open up in a way inconceivable to the country now, but vital to its continued success as an economic power.

So what are the downsides to Japan’s low birthrate? The two most typically cited are burdensome elderly care, and weakening national security. Let’s look at each in turn.

As global life expectancy increases, the costs of caring for the elderly will naturally rise in most major economies. It is not the rising cost of elderly care by itself that’s the problem, but the per-capita burden of these costs. An aging population isn’t bad if the productive workforce remains large proportionally. And in Japan, this just might be the case. The retirement age is projected to rise to 65 in the next few years; as major companies recognize older employees can still contribute to the workforce. And human-centered jobs like elderly care are cited as some of the best insulated against AI displacement. Almost circuitously, an older population may prove a source of employment.

What about national security, and Japan’s reduced ability to protect itself? Here again the coming technology revolution might suggest this is not as much of a problem as it seems. I believe the interdependent nature of today’s largest economies makes direct conflict unlikely, and even then Japan is bulwarked by its military relationship with the U.S. And if you believe, like I do, that digital warfare, IP-theft and cybercrimes are likely the battlefields of tomorrow, then a shrinking population simply reduces the surface area of the target.

The arguments presented here are intentionally overstated for the sake of brevity. I do not believe that a shrinking population is an unequivocal good. For example, I am particularly concerned about the cultural risks to Japan, and Japan’s diminishing influence abroad. And taken reductio ad absurdum, a declining population threatens the end of Japan itself. My point is chiefly that the coming technology shift means our old assumptions about human capital and domestic productivity do not necessarily hold.

Ultimately, I would prefer Japan to have a higher birthrate — like most rational thinkers. But I also try to look on the bright side of the population chasm. As AI eliminates traditional employment, Japan may actually be well-positioned to safely navigate its transition.

[Montmorency]

I know you and Montmorency are against any interventions at all to stabilize other countries, isn't allowing mass migration in a form intervention as well.

Maybe I'm even supportive of intervention in principle, but the argument isn't easily dismissed that any intervention in the current system is hopelessly imperialist and corrupt.


You make important points with respect to the elimination of work through automation, and the unforeseeable pressures that could result from technological disruption. These are an enormous challenge for any philosophy of governing.

But again, isn't immigration beside the point here? This is a collective human problem, and if we have any hope of addressing it then where or whether people migrate doesn't really make a difference, does it? If we organize the economy around the value of capital, then things will get worse for almost everyone because individuals will have increasingly less value. Maybe you could envision a scenario in which consumption grows increasingly wasteful and inefficient as corporations keep trying to increase value, but the consumer base becomes so precarious that governments have to juggle . In such a system, it would be tempting, and maybe even economical, to set low-skilled immigrants in slums, and give the select "citizen" class the benefits of guaranteed income and the welfare state, through which they can continue consuming. This way you also keep the commoners fighting each other for scraps in an atmosphere of permanent anxiety. Alternatively, people return to subsistence on a local level while governments fill in the gaps and facilitate some level of global movement of goods and people. The main object would be to somehow find "meaningful" and satisfying work toward their immediate communities, while not being strictly productive from the capitalist perspective of mass output and shareholder value (which would probably need to be abolished). I sketch that out not to claim these are the only possibilities or that the latter is an automatic utopia, but to point out that difficulties from economic migration today are symptomatic where they exist, and curtailing immigration would not help the fundamental problem relating to the question of how we use our resources and who decides.

Labor is also a good in a market, allowing the dumping of too much cheap labor upsets the market balance just as too much cheap food makes growing staple crops unsustainable. It too needs to be restricted and regulated in terms of it's the ability of the state to educate and retrain the labor pool as necessary. The current mass migration of unskilled labor has created a glut the market which is stagnating wages and encourages the rapid creation of banned goods. In 1st world countries that'd be drug and sex trafficking while in 3rd world countries it's those to plus slave trafficking, and financing of terrorism.

For instance here, in the current framework the economy is driven basically by only two things: population-linked consumption, and government stimulus. Increasing the population increases the consumer base, and in theory creates more jobs. But within capitalism the key innovation is in optimizing accumulation of resources and power from the environment and population into a small elite, far more efficiently than any aristocratic military adventure of yore; employment statistics are a red herring. Where we fret over whether "enough" jobs are created, we miss the bigger picture and take for granted the set of tools that we are given by default. In the end, whether or not immigration is compensated for by job growth, or some other economic indicator, we haven't identified the right question to ask. We are all told to make money, because making money is necessary for survival and because we have a shot at a glamorous and comfortable lifestyle - we are incentivized to move about. Then, where the international economy replaces the local rules of economic production, as in all the blighted rural landscapes across the world, we are forced to move or suffer the consequences. If most people could simply subsist on the spot, they would not choose to abandon their homes to seek a new life; most of the (any) problems specific to mass immigration disappear. I'm not taking into account natural or human disasters that may shift populations, or the dream of space colonization, but for example a Russian or Guatemalan would have little impetus to move to (what is now) the United States specifically, whereas now they do so for economic gain and to avoid economic or physical loss at home.

If we reject the capitalist logic, we no longer have to perceive any given problem as unique and isolated. Indeed, you can recognize capitalism as the fundamental problem here without endorsing any given alternative (though some follow more logically than others).

Slight digression toward the larger point:

[/SPOIL]I think I've always been strongly pro-GMO, and while the linked article is not necessarily anti-GMO per se, it raises some strong arguments against centralized industrial agribusiness driven by technoscientific oligopoly and financial markets. I don't know enough to check the details, but in concept it's worth hearing out.

It asserts that not only would localized, generational agriculture match or better the yield of intensive agriculture reliant on constantly-changing proprietary technology and external valuations, but it would also address current issues of intensifying ecological devastation to maintain or increase yields, declining food quality (perhaps more to do with global warming, but it is a feedback loop), and socially-ruinous migration from the country to megacities and slums in the developing world (destruction of local societies and ways of life).

The hard part is that we would have to change our consumption patterns (e.g. growing more food in gardens), and ~10% of our population would have to work in agriculture compared to ~2% in Western countries today.

Optimal results come from long, even multi-generational, experience applied in intimate relationship to each farm. Comparisons of organic and conventional agriculture often use organic farms recently converted from conventional practices; rarely do they consider the most highly evolved farms where soil, knowledge, and practices have been rebuilt over decades.

For organic agriculture to work, the factory model of standardized parts and procedures must give way to a relational model that recognizes the uniqueness of every piece of earth. So-called “organic” practices that use the factory model are simply an inferior version of conventional agriculture.

Gardening on this scale does not fit easily into existing consumerist lifestyles and mindsets. If we take for granted the framing of food security as “stocking the supermarket shelves” then again, there is little alternative to the current system.

If we take for granted disengagement from land, soil, and place, then there is little alternative to the current system.

If we take for granted continued rural depopulation in the less-developed world, then there is little alternative to the current system.

I say it isn't anti-GMO per se because genetic modification is a versatile and powerful technology that could certainly be used to replicate and augment traditional methods (in the colloquial sense of accelerated selection). The real argument here is against its commercialization, and the restrictive model commercialization entails, and even years ago I could have stood by a statement like "Hate Monsanto, don't hate the science." Abandoning the whole technology because of potential or prior misuse would be nuts.[/SPOIL]

[Fragony]

I don't take the illegal immigration debate seriously even at its most basic level. Nations are an obsolete byproduct of the age of imperialism. Nations are for fascists.

Takes one to know one. (international)national socialism right. People who can't see reason have this 'FASCiST' reflex, but they don't recognise it when looking in the mirror

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I shouldn't think so, Frags. I rather expect Graphic is one of those "citizen of the world" types.

In the end, I do not think that the actual manifestation of post-nationalism will have any of the semi-utopian qualities the "citizens of the world" believe it will engender. I tend to agree with those who assert it will end up generating some form of amoral familialism, though I could well be incorrect.

But the hope of most of those who long for a post-nationalism world is human freedom, which they view as being restricted in terms of real freedom by nationalism, and the freedom from want, which they view as being exacerbated by the institutionalized power-structures enacted by the nation-state both manifestly and latently for the purposes of keeping the powers that be on their lofty perches.

To be fair, there are inequities that are built into the system (whether overtly so or by happenstance is a side debate), so the C-o-t-W argument is not baseless.

[spmetla]

But again, isn't immigration beside the point here? This is a collective human problem, and if we have any hope of addressing it then where or whether people migrate doesn't really make a difference, does it?

It is a collective human problem but migration certainly does make a difference. Countries can only accommodate a certain amount of immigrants without collapse. Larger countries like the US can do so more easily, especially since the US was NOT founded as an ethno-nationalist state as the trend of the 18th and 19th centuries were. Small countries like Lebanon have been utterly ruined from too many refugees. Remember it used to be the "Paris of the Middle East" and the financial center of the region, it should have been able to prosper like the UAE and Qatar do today given internal peace and peace with it's neighbors.

Same for European countries, they are richer and have more territory and population so they can absorb immigrants a bit more easily but only to a certain extent. Too much and it overstresses the social safety net too much and can cause collapse. The cost of language training, housing, and job training will certainly be extensive, especially if it's on the scale of 200,000 migrants a year as Germany is capping it now.

Germany like the US also faces a shortage of SKILLED labor:
http://www.dw.com/en/germany-faces-h...ers/a-40294450

With technology replacing more and more jobs it will become more and more difficult to find jobs for migrants that face language and skills barriers not to mention cultural ones in regards to work, punctuality and personal responsibility.
There are attempts to work around this but it is difficult:
http://www.dw.com/en/german-organiza...rly/a-39699605

lthough Rami had years of experience in Afghanistan working in physical therapy, that did not qualify him to work in the health care field in Germany. Many refugees are facing this problem: their qualifications are not recognized by German institutions. Finding a proper job can take years and requires additional certifications and training courses. Rami decided to enter the BeQuFa program to give him a chance in the job market.
Fendi noted that many of the refugees have a difficult time understanding why their qualifications and experience are not recognized in Germany. Many of them want to jump into the field they worked in back home, but may not realize that Germany demands special qualifications to enter fields such as nursing or geriatric care. By attending the BeQuFa program the refugees will be able to get their diplomas recognized during their courses - but only if they can present a paper copy of the diploma. Others may have to start from scratch and do more training beyond the BeQuFa program to be able to work.

Think of it also from the point of view of the country that just educated and trained said person. If poor countries apply their scarce resources to educate people in these special skills and they skip the country to go to another just to find they will drive a truck instead it's a net loss for both countries. One has a loss on the investment they sunk in the individual and the other has to spend money to retrain said individual to work in a career that may or may not be what that person wanted to work in.

http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d7031

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Abstract
Objective To estimate the lost investment of domestically educated doctors migrating from sub-Saharan African countries to Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Design Human capital cost analysis using publicly accessible data.

Settings Sub-Saharan African countries.

Participants Nine sub-Saharan African countries with an HIV prevalence of 5% or greater or with more than one million people with HIV/AIDS and with at least one medical school (Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe), and data available on the number of doctors practising in destination countries.

Main outcome measures The financial cost of educating a doctor (through primary, secondary, and medical school), assuming that migration occurred after graduation, using current country specific interest rates for savings converted to US dollars; cost according to the number of source country doctors currently working in the destination countries; and savings to destination countries of receiving trained doctors.

Results In the nine source countries the estimated government subsidised cost of a doctor’s education ranged from $21 000 (£13 000; €15 000) in Uganda to $58 700 in South Africa. The overall estimated loss of returns from investment for all doctors currently working in the destination countries was $2.17bn (95% confidence interval 2.13bn to 2.21bn), with costs for each country ranging from $2.16m (1.55m to 2.78m) for Malawi to $1.41bn (1.38bn to 1.44bn) for South Africa. The ratio of the estimated compounded lost investment over gross domestic product showed that Zimbabwe and South Africa had the largest losses. The benefit to destination countries of recruiting trained doctors was largest for the United Kingdom ($2.7bn) and United States ($846m).

Conclusions Among sub-Saharan African countries most affected by HIV/AIDS, lost investment from the emigration of doctors is considerable. Destination countries should consider investing in measurable training for source countries and strengthening of their health systems.

The shortage of doctors in most African countries is attributed to institutes lacking the capacity to train sufficient numbers of doctors, coupled with an inability to retain doctors, who choose to emigrate for what they consider better career opportunities. Many wealthy destination countries, which also train fewer doctors than are required, depend on immigrant doctors to make up the shortfall. In this way developing countries are effectively paying to train staff who then support the health services of developed countries. Although developed countries often provide development assistance to resource limited countries, the amount that goes into the training of health workers is variable and limited.

This is a collective human problem, and if we have any hope of addressing it then where or whether people migrate doesn't really make a difference, does it?

To reiterate the above should point out that it DOES make a difference and as a collective human problem the current migration problems is making things worse for both losing and gaining nations.

In countries such as Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Afghanistan with an active war going it is of course a much more complex problem. Expecting people to stay in place with starvation, disease, violence, and all the corruption and other problems of a 3rd world nation make it more difficult for individuals there.
That's why in other threads I've been a staunch advocate of intervening to help as able. No nation is an island to the problems of the world and to ignore them only lets problems escalate. The solutions shouldn't always be military, or the imposition of a new system of government.

For refugees from these reasons they aren't always leaving with a clean slate either. The ethnic, religious, and cultural tensions will be brought back to the new host nation. Sri Lanka was in civil war for decades and the diaspora had to endure the terrorism of the Tamil abroad as well:
https://www.hrw.org/report/2006/03/1...iaspora#935788
My earlier example of Lebanon aided Palestinians after the creation of Israel and were later dragged into civil war and then wars with Israel as a result of that refugee community.

You see Turkish expatriates being coerced by Erdogan to vote in his favor. Kurdish and Turks now fight out their problems in Germany as well.
http://www.dw.com/en/german-police-c...orf/a-41241660
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-g...-idUSKCN0XA18Y


Heck you can go back to ancient Rome and the Gothic and other germanic 'refugees' if you want a truly extreme example as well.

The problems leading to refugees need to be addressed in some manner. Even if it means dealing with a dictator like Assad as opposed to an overthrow and the anarchy we've got in Libya and Yemen.

[Montmorency]

I will own to one tension in my pro-immigrant position, which is that I see it as socially constructive, while the basic socialist or anarchist/libertarian argument is that people have an inherent right to free movement. I'm too authoritarian to accept that.

To reiterate the above should point out that it DOES make a difference and as a collective human problem the current migration problems is making things worse for both losing and gaining nations.

I acknowledged this, but my point was - what solution actually gets to the root of the problem? You are recognizing various difficulties, but instability and inequality in poor countries will drive migration to richer ones. It is a related, but ultimately parallel problem that economic and technological forces are set to create similar conditions in the currently-rich countries, whose citizens will have nowhere to go to.

Let's say Western countries coordinate an optimum mix of skilled/unskilled immigration, and advertise it loudly and with clarity (in its details) to the world. But refugee and economic crises abroad will inevitably be exacerbated this century, which includes internal displacement and chaos in rich countries. Eventually we have a dichotomy: let more people in than our optimal ceilings dictate, or violate human rights in an effort to offload the problem on the nearest country we don't care about, thereby destabilizing them (to say nothing of that unspeakable recourse, genocide). The scenarios has room to get even worse.

A coordinated multilateral immigration policy would be a good idea in itself and can mitigate inflows, but it will be overwhelmed at some point.

If you want a permanent (better to say, durable, robust) solution, you need to look at changing the logics driving migration, and causing the conditions driving migration.

That's why in other threads I've been a staunch advocate of intervening to help as able. No nation is an island to the problems of the world and to ignore them only lets problems escalate. The solutions shouldn't always be military, or the imposition of a new system of government.

I think we can agree here that, both as an ethical matter and as a practical one of "handling the problem abroad rather than at home", rich countries need to intervene in migration crises, whether caused by war, economic upheaval, or by natural disaster and climate. If these interventions are to have a military/security component, it should be essentially defensive to avert the imperialist impulse (which also needs further checks on a case-by-case basis).

The object is to provide physical security, food and shelter, but also entertainment, community, education, employment: a return to normal life, even if subsidized by foreign states. To that end refugee camps will have to become new cities, and vice versa. How to integrate local leadership and government, and how to manage corruption, are serious questions, ones that we can hope will be constantly renewed under the auspices of enormously expensive operations. Hopefully a non- or low-military profile encourages rigorous oversight.

[Agent Miles]

I find it incredible that all of you totally miss the point. No one cares if millions of illegal aliens work in the U.S. and then go back to their homeland with their offspring and a paycheck they earned. Leftists teach the illegal aliens how to stay here, falsify a social security number, get welfare and subsidized housing wrongly, have the legal citizens pay for their children's education and get other government benefits that were supposed to be reserved for legal citizens. Further, the Left knows that these aliens will eventually become voters, who surely will repay the Left's efforts. Leftists have already made the case that in the 19th century foreigners could vote in some states. So it's not about poor little aliens being kicked out of work by evil Republicans. The problem is the Left importing voters. Fifty million voting age U.S. citizens would never be allowed to move to Canada and take over. Stop playing bells and whistles and focus on the real core issue.

[Fragony]

Leftist isn't something you are, it's something one has

[Husar]

I find it incredible that all of you totally miss the point. No one cares if millions of illegal aliens work in the U.S. and then go back to their homeland with their offspring and a paycheck they earned. Leftists teach the illegal aliens how to stay here, falsify a social security number, get welfare and subsidized housing wrongly, have the legal citizens pay for their children's education and get other government benefits that were supposed to be reserved for legal citizens. Further, the Left knows that these aliens will eventually become voters, who surely will repay the Left's efforts. Leftists have already made the case that in the 19th century foreigners could vote in some states. So it's not about poor little aliens being kicked out of work by evil Republicans. The problem is the Left importing voters. Fifty million voting age U.S. citizens would never be allowed to move to Canada and take over. Stop playing bells and whistles and focus on the real core issue.

Then make them legal so they can pay taxes for their childrens' education.
Voters get imported either way, who asked the original inhabitants to vote about who runs the country?
And again, if the republican base of Florida bankers stopped sniffing so much cocaine, maybe fewer illegal leftists would cross the border to flee from the friendly drug lords that the Republicans keep financing. The Republicans are entirely financed by billionaire business owners who are importing all these people to save on their trickle down expenses and because they hate paying taxes and healthcare plans for their workers. Stop the victim blaming here and focus on the real issue, which is the party you love so much!