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]