US Immigration and Border Security Thread

[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]