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Something I've never been clear on is how this dynamic is controversial. Obviously if labor is scarce wages will go up, eating away at the 'income inequality' boogeyman.
But try to argue that flooding the country with cheap labor will (besides making housing much more expensive) drive down wages and people smirk and tell you that's the "lump of labor" fallacy.
I don't think it is though. Yes, having more people around also generates some economic demand, but surely this is in the same sense that broken windows will generate economic demand? Unless those people are actually providing more value than they cost -- and here we must consider healthcare, education, wear and tear on infrastructure, social friction, decline in cohesion, crime, and so on -- doesn't the argument come down to "Well we have more mouths to feed so that generates economic activity"? And isn't that rather the broken window fallacy?
What is going on here?
Yes, it will drive up wages, but those wages will buy less, because there are less workers to produce goods and provide services. As long as each person produces more than they consume, each additional worker makes us better off.
There are two big hiccups:
"As long as each person produces more than they consume"; is this true? Illegal immigrants are generally not eligible for welfare, but they drive on public roads, use public libraries, illegal immigrant children go to public schools, etc. There are also negative externalities, but Latinos are much less criminal than blacks, and Latinos get rid of blacks, so it's probably a net positive.
Housing. We have insane zoning policies that forbid us from simply building enough housing for everyone. Per pigeonhole principle, if you have 100,500 people but only space for only 100,000, then 500 people must be homeless and the remaining 100,000 will spend all their spare money bidding up the rent to avoid being homeless. If you deport 1000 people and get the population down to 99,500, that would make a huge difference.
(Of course, would be better to just build more housing, but there wasn't a build more housing candidate on the ballot; there was a deportation candidate)
No, they totally are, at least in many blue states. Medicaid is often open to illegal immigrants and many of them qualify because they don't report their taxes. I don't want to self-dox, but I literally see people who can't speak English interacting with state welfare systems on a daily basis.
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Changing tacks here but I'm not a fan of 'build more housing' outside of already-established high-density areas. I've seen too many lovely towns get ruined by the government deciding to (only) approve large blocks of 'low-income' housing which totally destroys the character of the community. Not to mention the natural beauty that tends to get paved over. Over time everything seems to tend toward a concrete hellscape and nowhere is different from anywhere else.
Also I'm just horrified by the loss of the dignity of single-family dwellings. My gut says that living in dense cities is somehow injurious to the human spirit and generates a lot of sicknesses downstream. If someone lives in an entirely man-made environment, why wouldn't they believe that everything's a social construct? Whereas if they're raised in and around nature, they will also perforce have to contend with nature, which would seem to inculcate some common sense in addition to other virtues.
I guess it's just not clear to me why we need more people rather than getting our existing people to be more productive.
Rural resentment and envy again.
In my experience you have a tendency to project uncharitable motivations to your interlocutors' beliefs and then cattily state your guesses as fact. It hasn't been helpful in the past and it's not helpful now. Frankly I'm not sure why you're here.
I live in a much denser neighborhood than I'd like because it lets me make great money in the Bay Area (and my urbanite wife can't handle power outages or driving more than five minutes to amenities). If anything I'm envious of rural people. My hope is to make enough money that I can afford rural-ish property near a major urban center before my kids are too old to get the value out of that sort of upbringing.
This is offered as an opportunity for you to reflect upon your unwarranted and unwholesome pattern of behavior.
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Do you have any ideas about how to do that?
Reduce handouts and eject cheap foreign labor (especially of the illegal sort).
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Sounds like the kind of thinking that got us "banning abortion will strengthen the family." None of the people who said that admitted they were wrong when the experiment was carried out. We shouldn't base government policy on "gut feelings" of these people.
Did anyone actually say that? The pro-life movement is an alliance of women(not known for their utilitarian) who really care about babies and mostly make 'killing a baby' arguments.
I know you don't like the pro-life movement. But don't put words in its mouth.
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How many said that to begin with? Most arguments against abortion I've heard of boil down to "it's evil", not some utilitarian mumbo-jumbo.
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I don't think anyone was talking about either of those things, but your opinion is noted.
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Working-class neighborhood here. I've heard older people in my neighborhood talk about "neighborhood character". I don't know what they're talking about.
If someone knocks on my door, 95% of the time it's a salesman. If I get mail, 95% of the time it's ads for things that do not increase my quality of life. I've lived in my house for 7 years and I still haven't talked with everyone on my block yet. Not for lack of trying.
I don't see a "neighborhood character" that's worth preserving. How do you describe a "neighborhood character" that's worth defending?
Assume that you are a democrat and you have progressive inclinations, and you live in a community of similarly minded individuals.
What if I told you I was going to import a lot MAGA Republicans, and not the standard Republicans, but ones who compete amongst themselves to buy Trump-labeled kitsch. Who immediately demand that the public library be replaced with a church, and the lesbian cafes with titty bars. That the buses should be sold for scrap as they take too much space on the street for their hummers to pass. And not only are they so numerous as to immediately change the demography of the town, they also vote, so that your well-meaning local representative is replaced by a used car salesman who loots the public treasury at every opportunity.
This would approximate the reaction that many people have to having the city's least desirable renting underclass moved into their neighborhood.
So I live in a Blue-ish neighborhood with a large immigrant population, I can point-for-point compare your predictions with what's actually happened.
We still have more churches than libraries. But our schools are closing due to lack of enrollment. If a church wants to move in, that's where the room is. And when it happens it'll probably be Black-led.
We had a titty bar about five miles west of my house. It got demolished, and a three-over-one apartment complex with wraparound services is in its place. I've never been to either - couldn't tell you what they're like.
We had a lesbian-owned bar across from the library. Mural-sized portraits of Frida Kahlo, Sandra Day O'Connor & other progressive saints were on the walls. They've since picked up and moved to a bigger location ten miles away. It wasn't a great place for me to drink, but others seemed to like it well enough.
We have an immigrant on city council. He's a Republican.
I won't go full Op-Ed and try to create a story about all this. It would create an incomplete map - and we know about the differences between maps & territories here.
None of this answers the original question: what is a "neighborhood character" that's worth defending?
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I'm reminded of a very pro-immigrant friend who was absolutely indignant at the Free State Project and people moving to New Hampshire to vote their values...
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'Well meaning local representatives' suck. Local governments should be small enough to be a home for deranged ideologues and criminally-inclined hotshots without causing much problem.
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Adding several hundred low-income units to the immediate area will make it much worse, I assure you. Though it sounds like you live in a pretty crappy place already.
The breakdown of social cohesion and community bonds is well underway for other reasons, yes, but this only accelerates the process, and hard.
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