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"Even conservatives (who are more sided towards birth rates being an issue but still 40% believe in overpopulation more) do it when they complain about immigrants "taking jobs""
This seems very obviously false. Do you actually believe this? That conservatives who complain about immigrants taking jobs are concerned about sharing a fixed pie with more people rather than with immigrants who will do jobs for less money forcing the price of labour down. I'm far from a conservative, but I've heard the second plenty (from people on both sides) and never, even once, heard the first.
Those are literally the same thing. If you believe immigrants working jobs will drive down prices like that then you believe the pie share of pay shrinks faster than the pie size grows when you add more people in. And this of course also is accompanied with the belief that the pie share shrinking on the employee end doesn't have a positive impact on the emplouee and consumer ends whose pie would grow from paying lower prices. Now the former can be true of specific industries if immigrants are more likely to work those but the corollary to that is that there are industries they're less likely to work in so society wise it should balance out unless you generally don't think the overall society pie scales to match additional labor.
Which of course is also another part of how nativism thinks the exact same way as the unionists where they don't understand, or just don't care, that rent seeking from workers has a negative impact on everyone else in the country. Although saying they "think the same way" is improper, greedy unionists and nativists are often the same exact group to begin with!
OK, as I explained to the other commenter, I think you're wrong, but I understand why you think they're the same. On first reading it seemed like you must have missed a sentence.
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The price of labor will be forced down if the pie is fixed. If the pie is growing and immigrants are adding more jobs as well as more goods and services, it means that wages throughout the economy offer more buying power.
They're really not the same.
We have zero sum and non-zero sum relationships with everyone. Simplifying from a nation to a single company as an example:
Everyone from the owner down to janitor have a shared stake in the company staying solvent, but there are non zero sum relationships too. The owner would like to pay the janitor the smallest amount that still gets his floors cleaned and toilets unblocked. Part of the janitor's bargaining power is that while he won't work for a peanut, no one else will either. If the owner can pull some strings and get access to a bunch of workers who will work for a peanut then the janitor had better either accept the peanut or be out off a job. They are aligned in some ways, but not in others. This is true no matter how much value the new cheap workers add to the company or how much of the savings could potentially be passed on to the consumer.
If we dismiss the janitor's complaints as a dumb yokel failing to understand that immigrants are adding to the economy and increasing his buying power, we're the ones not understanding the whole picture.
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