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Notes -
How about some culture war? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/30/how-gang-violence-took-hold-of-sweden-in-five-charts
While I imagine the Guardian is persona non grata around here, this seems to me to be pretty stunning. Sweden, long the darling of the left, is now “… in the grip of a rise in gang violence and shootings that has taken citizens and leaders by surprise. In the words of the prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, this year: “Sweden has never before seen anything like this. No other country in Europe is seeing anything like this.””
I’m leery of rephrasing the article excessively, but it does note that gun crime and narcotics have been rising since 2013, and that the gun murder rate in the capital of Stockholm is now 30 times that of London.
The fairly standard claim (this is the Guardian, after all) is that this has to do with poverty, not migration.
So… Is the solution, now that mass migration has been accomplished, to make sure that they have just as much money as the original Swedes? Given the Swedish welfare state was already extremely generous, which drove all the immigration, is that feasible?
Americans really don’t appreciate how good we have it in terms of our pool of immigrants. Immigrants in America are awesome. Low crime, hard workers, values that mesh well with the native population. Even our “bad” immigrants commit crimes at the same rate as native whites and are much better behaved after adjusting for income.
https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mythical-tie-between-immigration-and-crime
Some thoughts:
There are probably many factors specific to the US (and probably Canada too) that make this true, but the big ones are probably (a) geography and (b) extremely positive selection caused by various policies and reputation.
It’s hard to understand how badly informed most Americans are about our immigrants. Besides the data linked above my anecdotal interactions with blue collar Hispanic immigrants is unbelievably positive. My experience with white collar immigrants is that they’re just like me but with an accent. The most anti immigrant people seem to have had no interactions with immigrants as far as I can tell.
Besides the obvious “they’re taking our jobs” economic fallacy (immigration creates more demand for labor too), the whole “elites don’t mind immigration because immigrants don’t compete with them economically” is prima facie absurd. Have you seen the composition of google’s workforce? Other elite institutions?
US immigration is freaking awesome but Europeans should be careful about generalizing because everything in Europe seems set up to attract a much much worse pool of immigrants, from an ultra generous welfare state (real or imagined) to geographical proximity to regions with lot of emigrating bad hombres.
I am anti-immigrant and have had ample interactions with them. They are not just like you and me. If they were, why do they insist on speaking their native language in public? Why do I have to press 1 for English? Why do they wear their old culture's clothing? Why do they congregate in communities with their own instead of assimilating?
I can't imagine immigrating to another country and refusing to speak their language and wear their clothing. I'd be overcome with embarrassment and shame at such a flagrant display of disrespect and hostility to the country that was gracious enough to accept me in.
There are certainly many immigrants that assimilate, but it doesn't take many defectors to change the character of a community.
If white Americans wore their own culture's clothing, rather than dressing like stoner slobs, then America would be a better place. The same is also true, but less so, in western Europe. At least the immigrants are making an effort to dress well.
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I could not care less about what languages somebody else chooses to speak, their sense of fashion, and the geographic origin of who they like hanging out with. That's their personal business. Why be so offended and take it as a personal insult when others are not a mirror of your manner of speaking, fashion sense, and social life? Why is it an act of hostility? Attempting to force somebody else to speak, dress, etc the same as you sounds like much more of hostile action than just coexistence with you doing you and them doing them.
Because they're coming to a new country and signaling that they don't intend to integrate. They intend to change the culture to conform to their way of doing things. How do you not see that as profoundly disrespectful and hostile? It'd be like if I invited you into my home and you recognized that I do things certain ways - no shoes indoors, toilet seats stay lowered, lights stay off when not in use - and you disregard it and do what the fuck you want. Except, unlike in the analogy, I can't kick you out once you got here.
No wonder you're confused about why some people are anti-immigrant.
If America had a high-standards culture like Japan I would see it as utterly degenerate for immigrants to do anything but try to uphold it, but we're talking about the West, here, which has always held to barbaric if practical customs.
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"Integration" is inherently give-and-take. Unlike your example with the house, you don't own your culture alone, it is shared, and so the extent to which it demands conformism is shared too.
It is kind of ironic that you referred negatively to communism, yet are coming off as if you would ideally want every newborn and new arrival to sync into lockstep with one snapshot of native culture, forever. If I'm incorrect, please explain: how does your model of respect towards native culture allow for any sort of change and evolution? Is it that one "earns" the right to deviate by becoming/being fully native? Would it be fine to start dressing and talking differently after being born there?
And I advocate for other people who share my culture to agree to keep it from changing in a negative way, and that includes preventing too much immigration.
Yes. Just like I don't think people who are members of totalitarian ideologies should be allowed to immigrate to the US (and indeed they aren't, I don't think Americans who are members of totalitarian ideologies should be punished for it.
Residents of a country have more rights and freedoms in that country than people who aren't residents of that country.
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Illegal immigration costs the US taxpayer $150 billion a year in govt expenditure out/revenue in terms but said report feels free to sideline incarcerations for immigration-related offenses as though that's not 'real' crime...
Besides, 'they're taking our jobs' is undeniable fact, for certain groups of 'our'. Illegal immigrants are a subset of immigrants. Illegal immigrants can get paid cash-in-hand and are more competitive than legal workers with the accompanying tax and regulatory demerits (from the point of view of employers). In a market economy, those who can work more cheaply will take the jobs of those who are more expensive to pay.
Finally, legal immigration automatically depresses wages and employment for domestic workers in that same industry. Just because immigration is not obviously harmful to us white-collar workers generally (though it certainly can be), it does not follow that it's good for everyone:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w23153
https://docs.iza.org/dp9107.pdf
And besides the economic aspects of mass immigration, we also have to deal with the social aspects of mass immigration. Allegiance to foreign powers, decline in communal/national feeling...
It seems relevant to note that a large percentage of illegal immigrants work in sectors which can't hire native workers at wages reasonable for the skill level, eg meatpacking plants.
A massive influx of slave labor (from Gaul, if I recall correctly) destroyed the economy of the late Roman Republic as surely as Chinese and illegal immigrant slave labor have the potential to destroy America's (if they haven't already; Canada's and Europe's are well on its way.) It created a massive influx of urban poor, too.
The whole point of going to China (or Mexico, Japan, SEA, Africa, etc.) is that you don't have to pay nearly as much in wages or for materials, the local government handles slave revolts for you, and you don't have to pay for novel solutions to environmental regulations (which are, in part if not in intent, designed to make sure US industry remains minimally competitive). It was always going to result in very specific people getting rich at the expense of everyone else.
Interestingly, that also implies that the unpleasantness of a job will lead to increased prices for the goods that job produces; ironically the solution to "but we want to ban farming because muh whatever" might come from "working in meat-packing plants is awful enough that people are demanding software engineer salaries to work in them" more than anything else.
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Then those businesses should go bankrupt and be replaced by ones willing to pay real wages. I'm perfectly happy to pay a bit more for my steak if it means the immigrants are no longer hanging around depressing wages and inflating property prices.
I won't remark upon you specifically, but the howling from the most anti-immigrant voters in the US about inflation suggests this isn't the case for most people. They like the idea of getting rid of immigrants, but they absolutely do not want to get rid of the benefits of immigrants.
YES THEY DO!
The "benefits" of immigrants are not evenly distributed, and in fact tend to accumulate at the higher levels of society. The people who benefit from illegal immigrants are not the people on wages who now have to compete for their labour, but the people who benefit from keeping the costs of services and manufacturing low - and do you think those people are living in the same kinds of real estate that illegal immigrants drive up the prices for? Talk about the economic benefits of migrants tends to talk about how they benefit "the economy" in abstract as a way to avoid talking about the actual impacts, positive and negative, that they have.
And as for those anti-immigrant voters, I'm extremely confident that a lot of them would be more than happy to pay a bit more for their steak in exchange for losing the negative consequences of illegal immigration, because those negative consequences involve them paying more and getting paid less.
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We could easily use temporary working visas and scrap chain migration to keep the benefits of immigration without paying the cost. Only hand out permanent residency and family reunification to the highly skilled ones who will be net contributors. There's a practically unlimited amount of low skilled workers who want to migrate here, we don't have to do anything special to attract them.
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The fact that people are lamenting inflation in the last few years does not mean that they would be against all policies that would cause inflation. The inflation of the last few years is regarded by people on the right as an unforced error with no significant beneficial trade-offs. Just pure loss. By contrast, substantially reducing immigration - even if it resulted in slightly higher grocery bills - would be a substantial benefit (from their perspective) worth the tradeoff.
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I grew up in a blue collar family. I've known/worked with/lived next to many blue collar immigrant families. That main issue for everyone is illegal immigration. Having workers that don't have to pay income tax and companies that don't have to pay payroll tax, OSHA regs, etc., creates an unfair market which hurts blue collar wages.
The amount of eye rolling I've gotten from 'informed white collar Americans' basically pointing to a bad study and tell me I'm wrong is waaay too high.
I seems like you're the one with no actual interactions with the people you are talking about.
As a lilly white former trady in the brown zone FROM the brown zone: big shrug lol.
I also just don't believe it when people tell me their solution to immigration is to eg. criminalize it even harder instead of paying like 20000 guys total to just roll around various job sites factories and farm feilds, do green card checks, and fucking ANIHILATE any company that fails to pass.
If hiring illegals to do osha violating skut work for pennies is punished with a stern finger wag is it actually a crime?
It's the classic identiterian nationalist/ rich dude who thinks the first guy is a fucking idiot coalition imo.
Just bring back legal temp workers, let them stay for a harvest season and then if they can do that a couple years in a row without driving drunk or some shit let them apply for a green card and don't make into a 8 year long Brazil style nightmare to actually get.
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Our immigrant pool is ... fine, certainly not awesome. It could be so much better than it already is if US immigration was intentionally administered in the interest of good immigrants. IQ tests, demonstrations of technical skill, unlimited in number but very expensive paid sponsorships, maybe with a culture exam or something if you care about that. Instead, there's generic administrative stasis and a political tug of war between 'poor mexican immigrants :(' and 'And Some, I Assume, Are Good People', and only minor improvements get done by pro skilled immigration interest groups.
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