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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7004 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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Immigration is the white whale of the right, but it's not going away because the people demanding its abolition want to dismantle the engine while retaining everything it powers.

This will animate a lot of people, but serious anti-immigration rightists need to sell a practical program after closing the borders. Believe it or not, corporations do NOT possess an inexhaustible treasure chest of profits which can simply be redistributed to American workers without affecting prices, employment, investment, or competitiveness. Economics is not a zero-sum ledger in which every foreign worker represents an American deprived of his rightful wages. Someone needs to foot the bill! Usually, that's the American consumer.

No, I am NOT for mass immigration (don't shoot the messenger!). I strongly believe that GDP should not be the sole measure of national well-being, and a country is entitled to care about social cohesion, domestic wages, or demographic preferences over maximum economic growth. But the tradeoffs those priorities involve are not at all minor. You can't have inexpensive software and cheap subscription services without cheap labour.

Editing to add that the above is triply pronounced in the matter of offshoring, another white whale of the right.

This is a thing that I try to explain over and over again to the very immigration concerned. There are some jobs which, in practice, require young-ish male labour. There are a certain number of American young males willing to do physical labour. That number is less than the number of jobs needing them; raising wages will not make the market clear, it'll just redistribute them from commercial fishing and oil drilling to whatever you raised wages in. The obvious solution is hondurans- they're willing to do physical work and the normal wages in these fields are already an exceptional deal for them. The alternative is using the criminal justice system to coerce lower class American men into these jobs. That, too, has its limits. But immigration into the US is driven largely by the market for physical laborers not clearing because there is a shortage of physical laborers.

here are a certain number of American young males willing to do physical labour.

The number will increase significantly if wages and working conditions improve.

That number is less than the number of jobs needing them;

citation needed

The alternative is using the criminal justice system to coerce lower class American men into these jobs. That, too, has its limits.

Or you could use the carrot approach and give them money to work. And maybe the stick of taking away their gibs.

But immigration into the US is driven largely by the market for physical laborers not clearing because there is a shortage of physical laborers.

Or it could be driven simply by the fact that the clearing market rate, set by supply and demand, for unskilled physical labor, is far higher in the US than it is in the home countries of these people.

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