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In any pay to win game, the whales are not the best players, they just stack abuse and ruin the game for anyone who isnt whaling as hard. This applies to immigration as well, because a skill ceiling is not the same as a funds ceiling. The difference between games and real life is that real life has plenty of other incentive structures that can be exploited beyond the confines of 'getting to the country', and it is these incentives which lead to the massive negative effects of immigration being inflicted on unwilling native populations.
Pay to win immigration in its current form - investment immigration or high-skill work visa sponsorship - does not necessarily attract the best people in skills or morals. The only thing it controls for is absolute numbers of the migrants and their web of newly eligible dependants, which can reduce the frequency of assholes within this diminished population interacting with the wider world and mitigate negative externalities.
For low value immigration right now the value capture of fund availability to immigrate to the west is by the smugglers, but the negative externality is still wholly borne by the west and the smuggler costs are miniscule compared to the long term economic damage of illegals. Andrew Tate is a loathsome gremlin spewing garbage from his food hole, but as far as the romanians are concerned its just a few women that end up suffering his predations, a calculus far less objectionable than one refugee bringing 8 relatives and spawning 6 kids on permanent welfare.
As it stands the negative consequences of immigration are largely from illegal immigration and asylum claimants, whether those negative consequences are a suppression of lower end wages or active criminal behavior, and the compounding effect of parallel existing policies is what amplifies these negative effects.
Society is an open-ended multiparty cooperative game with imperfect information. Whatever stable equilibria we enjoy in our current societies is due to a common understanding of payoffs for cooperation and defection with other players in the game. Some societies now have an exploitable meta of 'self declared victimization' which blocks consequences for defection, and society breaks in areas with those rulesets.
New entrants unfamiliar with the meta will inevitably choose defect eben by accident, and reveal that the game was lost to begin with. Unless the payoff matrices are formalized and commonly understood, it will not matter whether immigrants pay 100k to ICE or 10k to a coyote. Someone somewhere somewhen will end up defecting, and the game meta will continue breaking.
This is a good point, but I do wonder if, “one trillion dollars in fraud against the American people,” plays better on the campaign trail than, “ten million illegal aliens”.
I suspect the messaging will be interpreted differently by different people. Motivated reasoning causes progressives to automatically presume the quantifiable costs of illegal immigration is false, just like how conservatives will say the same about quantifiable benefits of immigration. As a political slogan, money spent by the government is too easily a figure fudged by creative definition assignment that everyone automatically slots stated figures into an existing worldview and the actual numbers are so far removed from our daily understanding that there is no way we can parse it - is one trillion really that much more affective than one billion?
The first problem of illegal immigration is that you can't easily return the illegal to their home country. Deporting someone needs their home country to accept them, and if a migrant burns their passport or claims their home country is unsafe they get to stay forever. Deportations at the border occur for the USA because you can definitively prove that they came from Mexico at that point. Once someone disappears into the US and burns their passport they are effectively permanent residents, unable to be shoved off anywhere to be someone elses problem.
I previously spoke about setting up anarchyisle as a nation with citizenship automatically granted to anyone in the world just so that western countries can deport literally anyone to Anarchyisle at will, allowing deportations to be conducted with sufficient political will.
The other solution is to have all illegal migrants exist in a lawless state, unprotected by any legal rights such as minimum wages, medical care, family reunification visas or police protection from vigilantes. Similarly, they should be free of tax obligations and diversity initiatives. I'm sure New Mexico can have a Free Zone where businessmen will put in sweatshops to manufacture cheap plastic garbage guarded by private security and staffed by grateful outlaws earning double the minimum wage of their home countries. If even that is economically unviable, then what the fuck are these migrants even doing in the USA to begin with.
G'day, Mate!
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