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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31437 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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To me, increased immigration seems like a no-brainer,

Do you mean this in the sense that you would have to have no brain in order to support it?

The situation being presented makes more of a case for immigration flows to immediately go into reverse, rather than the opposite. If age ratios are changing and adjusting like this, why would you want to depress native fertility by importing a bunch of low-skilled workers who will drive up real estate values, drive down wages, create "bad school" zones that represent an additional hidden cost to family formation(amongst people who you would want to form a family), etc. Even if you give the pro-migrant cause as good of a hearing as the data suggests, the nature of it as a short-term fix means that it isn't actually a worthwhile answer to the problems in question - just kicking the can down the road.

why would you want to depress native fertility by importing a bunch of low-skilled workers

This is the first time I've heard this claim. Is there empirical evidence to support this?

I'm actually collecting evidence on this and writing a longer article, because it is something that strikes me as intuitively obvious and I can identify multiple causal mechanisms, make theories that accurately predict what's happening... but I haven't actually finished yet, because dealing with all the confounding factors is really hard and it isn't like I can just have a control USA built in the Pacific and let it run for 80 years. That said this has the caveat that I'm talking about immigration of largely low-skilled workers, the kind that's actually happening in western countries. If you had nothing but a constant stream of nobel prize winning norwegians then obviously you'd have a different impact. Also, while you can look at the fertility rates of countries experiencing high migration flows and the data supports my argument... it also supports all kinds of other arguments, so caveat emptor.

But if I had to summarise the main thrust of the argument...

  1. Migrants place upward pressure on housing prices, both by driving up demand, being able to tolerate worse conditions than natives (even shithouse western accomodation is better than the average for a lot of immigrant-sources) and by the creation of migrant "ghettoes", which effectively take even more property off the market for natives and hence driving up prices. Housing affordability is a big concern when it comes to family formation, because most people don't want to have several children when all they can afford is a two-bedroom apartment.
  2. Migrants are a net drain on resources - when you look at the studies performed in the Nordic countries, and I believe even in the USA, most migrants are ultimately a financial cost to the country that hosts them. They consume more in public services, are responsible for more policing and enforcement costs, in many cases have cultural requirements that impose even further costs (translation, islamic prohibitions against dealing with women/strange men). These resources aren't just conjured up out of the ether ex nihilo - they're paid for via both taxes and inflation, which means that average, individual natives are worse off than they otherwise would be... and financial insecurity is a big culprit when it comes to delaying family formation, especially when the presence of these migrants makes getting your children into a "good school" even more expensive than it otherwise would be.
  3. Migrants place downwards pressure on wages. This is the main reason that large businesses want to import them, and why extremely rich people like Mark Zuckerberg think bringing in more migrants is such a great idea. Migrants are usually accustomed to far worse conditions for far worse pay, and hence are usually willing to work much harder for much less compensation. This doesn't sound too bad until you remember that a lot of first world nations have fought for and enacted a lot of labour policies which benefit workers - bringing in migrants from places with even more economic inequality means that they'll be grateful even for a bad job in a first world nation and willing to go above and beyond the call of duty. This ultimately harms the lower end of the native labour market the most, and I think most analyses of the economic impact of migrants look solely at the effect on large indicators like GDP etc rather than working out exactly who benefits and who does not. Additionally, this further emphasises the importance on investing heavily into one's children, to make sure they don't end up in an increasingly vicious and competitive low-skilled work environment.
  4. Bad behaviour - there's no way to really empirically study this, but there's a lot of conflict associated with bringing in migrants that can't really be measured that objectively. What was the impact of Rotherham on family formation among people in the area? I freely admit to needing to assemble more evidence on this front, and it is rather difficult (good luck getting funding for this study in western academia!) to study given just how personal it is. That said, while I believe this is one of the least impactful in raw numbers(unless you live in France maybe, but it isn't like the natives there don't burn the place down regularly anyway), I don't think just ignoring it is a good idea either. I'd also throw the generic damage to social capital in this category too.

So when you bring in large numbers of migrants you make property more expensive, you drive down wages, you take away resources from people who are looking to start families and at the same time impose additional costs on them. Economic uncertainty and housing availability show up as factors fairly consistently in all the studies on family formation rates that I've seen in the west - and even the people who support increased immigration tend to agree that immigration has these impacts (they just usually think that the boost to GDP is worth the costs imposed on less well-off individuals in my experience). I freely admit to not having done all the work on establishing causation etc yet, but it is something I'm working on.

I think he’s referring to the cost of housing in the US making children unaffordable. A lot of millennials and zoomers can’t afford kids at all.

This claim has always sounded like an excuse to me, because I have only ever heard it from people who are middle or upper-middle class, while families much poorer than theirs both in this country and abroad are somehow able to raise multiple kids.

The cost of raising a child in the middle/upper classes is substantially higher than that of raising a child in the trailerpark, and the sort of middle/upper-middle class people who you generally want to reproduce care enough about the quality of life of their prospective children that they're going to want to be able to provide more. If you don't care about getting your kid into a good school in favour of prioritising your fentanyl habit you're going to be less effected by what's happening than someone who wants to make sure their kid has a chance at making the ivies, and more likely to have unplanned children to boot.

That's all true, but "I am unwilling to have a child if doing so means compromising on a middle class lifestyle for them or me" is not the same thing as "I cannot afford to have a child." Having known people whose parents gave them away to another family as children to keep them from going hungry, this is not a trivial distinction. We'd also be better off if those same prospective middle class parents were willing to make more economic compromises for the sake of raising children, as those children will turn out more or less the same regardless of which school district or extracurricular activities they're in.

Parents almost universally wish to make sure that their children have at least the same if not more opportunity than they do - and to be perfectly honest given the state of a lot of lower-income and migrant-heavy areas, I think it does actually become a matter of great significance if not life and death to the children in question and hence their parents. School districts might not manner to the degree that some parents believe, but they absolutely play a big part in future life paths and connections. Do you think telling prospective parents "Look I know you say you don't have enough money to afford a home in a good area, but why aren't you willing to move to Detroit? The money you'd save on mortgage repayments would allow you to have an extra kid!" is actually a viable idea? A lot of these people in the middle class have a galaxy of commitments and ties connecting them to their current locations and ways of life - you can demand that they all move to the barrios and start pumping out babies, but that just isn't a real solution in the world we live in.

If you do actually have the power to force these people to have and then raise their children in environments deeply hostile to future success in life, you would be better off using that power to reduce pressure in other ways. Cutting off migrant flows, child-raising and child-rearing subsidies, muscular enforcement efforts against migrant-induced wage suppression, etc. There are so many policy levers that can be pulled and ways pressure can be applied that make trying to forcibly adjust and manipulate the psychology of family formation to make them "more willing" to reproduce strikes me as a total non-starter. That said, a sudden collapse of society and plunge into a dark age would also convince these people to reproduce, but I think there are other consequences to that approach which render it a bad idea.

Do you think telling prospective parents "Look I know you say you don't have enough money to afford a home in a good area, but why aren't you willing to move to Detroit? The money you'd save on mortgage repayments would allow you to have an extra kid!" is actually a viable idea?

Moving to an inner city slum is not the only alternative to trying to live in the coastal elite bubble. There are dozens of smaller cities and towns in flyover country that have both a much lower cost of living and lower crime than the major metropolitan areas. Many of these are college towns that don't lack for quality schools and access to cultural or intellectual amenities either e.g. Ames, Ann Arbor, Athens, and that's just the A's. All it takes is giving up the conceit that anyone who doesn't live and work in New York or California is a miserable failure, but many of my peers seem to believe this deep in their bones.

At the end of the day though, I don't care much for or have any confidence in large-scale social engineering projects, so I'm not approaching any of this from a policy angle. Whoever ends up reproducing themselves gets to own the future, whether that's native-born Americans, Guatemalan immigrants, Hasidic Jews, or GPT-bots, and whatever opinions I have on which of those outcomes are better or worse are immaterial.

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They're able to buy iPhones as well, doesn't mean they can afford them.

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