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Notes -
Thanks!
🤔 But — could you describe how immigration harms you personally?
I'm asking because the general argument against immigration is an indirect economic argument. The argument typically goes like this: The land can support a certain size of population. If more people come in, the land will not be able to produce enough food for everyone.
The trouble is just: This argument is precisely the Malthusean theory that my quote of Henry George refers to. And it is unfortunately not an accurate model of reality — it's not true. And hasn't been since 1879. 😅 After the invention of fertilizers, land size is not a big issue anymore — the economy now runs on goods and services that people produce for each other. Sure, immigrants lead to more consumption of goods and services — but in order to be able to buy these, they also need to work to produce them. In other words, "land" has been replaced by "labor" — and while an immigrant can, by definition, not bring the resource "land" with them, they can and do bring the resource "labor" with them anywhere they go.
You already stung the hornet's nest plenty so this is just me piling on but where if not here.
Man, are you just shitposting? The only reason I'm not 100% convinced is because I'm not bothering to read all the related comments. But in between the smiley faces, the isolated demand for not even rigor but some other ridiculously narrowly defined criterion that attempts to avoid what actually bothers people, the putting-the-conclusion-before-any-argument eh rationalists what do you call that again, the stubborn refusal to even acknowledge other people's points which you just dodge in order to re-route the discussion to your favorite talking points...
I mean, you are being civil, so the bare minimum standards are met, but I'm just reading Trolling Attempt all over this.
That said, let's argue.
Would integration be at all necessary without immigration? Is it wise to have immigration when integration is unreliable or just completely outpaced by the formation of parallel societies? Is it wise to have immigration when you know full well that there are influential forces at work in policymaking that actively aim to use immigration against you? Hell yes it's a consequence of immigration.
Drug dealers should be shot, hanged, and shot again, and illegal immigrants who enter a wealthy country without permission only to proceed to deal drugs should be hanged and shot once more for good measure. What the fuck is the argument here? The refugee one - they had to flee from violence and persecution, that's why we need to accept them in spite of their coming illegally, but as soon as they gain safety they turn into scum? Oh hey, wonder why they needed to GTFO of their home countries then. Or is it actually that immigration is always good regardless of the motivation, and obviously they have a right to expect gainful employment in their target country?
And pray tell, where are those young foreigners coming from?
You're just completely ignoring that to many people, old-fashioned bigots that we are, a country is more than an economic zone with one or two regional dishes as "culture". And I do mean you are actively choosing to ignore it because it makes your arguments go more smoothly. Your ideology is destroying my country, the actual society and culture that make the country what it is, and replacing it with the same easily influenced, easily marketed-to, easily controlled global slurry you can find everywhere else that the third world found a route to. What is our future now? Corrupt shithole, Brazil-style? Or just violent islamized shithole #78? Certainly no gleaming socialist utopia.
No, I'm serious. 😅 I mean, I know that I'm not going to convince anybody, but I want to learn what you think, because of my statement here:
"I do believe that he [Trump] will make the lives of almost everyone worse, including his own supporters, except for the direct beneficiaries of his authoritarian rule."
I genuinely think that Trump's policies are going to harm you, who seems to support him. That is why I can't quite make sense of why you're supporting him. As mentioned, I'm humanist, I do not want you to be harmed, because you are a human being, that's why I'm posting in the first place. Essentially, I'm asking myself "Why are you going to hurt yourself?" 😅 You're probably seeing this differently, and that's fine — all I can hope for here is to gain some more insight into your thoughts.
To pick on this point: The problem is that you can't voluntarily choose to not have immigration — people who are desperate enough will try to come and take very high risks. I mean, seriously, which human being in their right mind wants to risk being shot for walking over a border? You'd only risk that if your current live is worse than this risk. This means that if situation on the other side is terrible enough, you will have immigration — and then it's better policy to invest into integration, because that ameliorates follow-up problems later on. "Nah, I don't want to invest into integration because I don't want immigration in the first place" doesn't work out.
This goes against my core value, humanism. Do not inflict bodily harm other human beings, regardless of whom. (There is a subclause on what happens when other people want to inflict bodily harm on you, which I will not go into here). That is why leftists do not condone attempts at assassinating Trump and there was no Jan 6th equivalent. Do not inflict bodily harm.
Do they become "scum" voluntarily? Or is it because they are not allowed to work? If you can't work legally — you have to work illegally, because you have to buy food. The policy of not allowing immigrants to work is actually causing them to work illegally. Duh.
Genuine question: From this answer, I take it that you are not humanist? That's it's ok to inflict bodily harm on other human beings if they qualify for some criteria? Not sure I'm ok with that, but it seems to me that this a core value that I should check with you.
The thing is this: Whether "my ideology" is destroying your country or not is up to debate. But that's not what I'm really concerned about when posting here — the point that I'm genuinely concerned about that Trumps is destroying your country in a way that you don't realize.
Look, if I wanted to destroy your country, I would do it exactly like Trump — throw random nonsense at the internet, stick to the things that people believe in ("Huh, apparently they care about immigration, sure, let's go with that"), make up some policies that work or do not, I don't care, as long as they are flashy — while enriching myself and those most loyal to me. I would play the difference between what you think is a good idea ("restrict immigration") and what will improve your life in reality ("UBI", universal health care, … — I think so, up to debate), and you would never know the difference. I would use your own beliefs against you.
I'm sorry, are you saying that there is no criteria which justifies bodily harm on another human being?
OF COURSE it's OK to inflict bodily harm on other human beings if they qualify for it! That's what it means to qualify! That's what it means to have criteria!
There's a whole lot else I have problems with in your post, but that part stuck out the worst.
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How authoritarian that will be, as far as I know, remains to be seen. He certainly did not install himself as dictator for life the last time around, and life, for what I know, continued without death camps, monuments to the dictator, the construction of a new palace of Versailles, wars over petty slights, deadly purges or any of the other hallmarks of authoritarian rule. Of course he will work for the benefit of his cronies, he's a democratically elected politican after all and that's what they all do, but I don't see why one should decline to elect the crook who's likely to have desirable side-effects if all the alternatives are liable to get up to the same self-serving shenanigans while offering nothing beneficial in return.
Well, big caveat up front - I'm German, not American, and I favor Trump not as a voter and citizen but purely as a commentator, for his effects on the Culture War. So his negative impact on me is...tariffs? I'll take that. Go Trump. Every since he was elected non-leftist politicians in Germany seem to have found one or two extra vertebrae that were previously thought missing, much appreciated. Would I vote for him if he were running for Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany? Yes actually. He can't do more damage than the decades of leftst control of the narrative have already done, and if it shifts the overton window back towards a more reasonable place, then I'm happy to pay whatever price the Americans are currently about to pay for their electroal misdeed. Why am I going to hurt myself? It's a small sacrifice for a shot at a very necessary change in direction.
Should one stop to enforce the law if only because law-brakers are more persistent than the legally and politically hamstrung enforcers who are being actively sabotage by ideologically motivated agents who desire immigration at any cost? Are you in favor of private gun ownership because people will always find ways to arm themselves? The greedy and the duplicituous will always find ways to enrich themselves at the expensve of the gullible and the shortsighted, so should you make your peace with that? What if I see immigration as something that can absolutely be controlled, provided that there be a will to do it, and not a deeply entrenched culture of sabotage and subversion?
Great. Let's pick them up very gently and also very gently drop them off on the other side of a heavily fortified border. No need to do bodily harm. This is fine. Bodily harm is not my terminal value here. We can reach a practical compromise I'm sure.
There's a huge market for all kinds of under-the-table work that isn't dealing drugs. Someone who deals drugs in a first-world country isn't doing so because it's literally the only thing he can do to avoid starvation. Hell, good luck on managing to literally starve in America or Germany. I doubt you'll find anyone who succeeded at that, unless he's tooo drugged up to drag himself to the closest welfare service point.
Of course I'm not a "humanist". I'd say it's okay to inflict bodily harm for sufficiently good reasons, and outright stupid to bend yourself into a pretzel to avoid it at any cost. I'd say we can do fine without inflicting bodily harm very much most of the time, but a principled refusal to employ violence ist just an open invitation to abuse by others. See exactly what we are discussing - our refusal to enforce our own rules on the people who break them leads to the rules getting broken increasingly fragrantly, because we'd rather make excuses than risk being called "inhumane".
Is that...concern trolling, I think it's called? I strongly doubt that is actually your concern. Trump cannot possibly do more damage to Germany than progressive ideologues have done. There's not enough left by now - even were he to literally nuke it to the ground, he'd have only a small share in the country's demise. I realize very much what is going on in my country, even as I keep being told by media and many endlessly "humane" compatriots that my lying eyes deceive me.
Then you would be a smart self-serving politican and very uninspired and uneffective in destroying my country. My country is not a machine for handing out welfare.
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Be nice to the lefty. “stubbornly refusing to even acknowledge other people's points“ is an accusation leveled at every unpopular opinion on every circlejerk of the internet.
There is nothing troll-y about his counter-argument, it’s eminently sensible, I’ve made it myself many times against doomer/resource depletion types. It just happens to counter an immigration-restrictionist argument that this forum does not use, so it kind of falls flat here, but they can’t know that.
That may be. Maybe everyone does it. But honest-to-God, that's what I see here.
Fair. I say so myself when they're aren't pushing my buttons. Got off on the wrong foot here.
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Thanks for being nice to, uh, the lefty. :D I don't really want to argue about the pros and cons of immigration here, as my main point is about Trump and deception, but in order to argue that deception might be going on here, I can't avoid debating the policy issue.
It’s nothing, I have admiration for people who iceskate uphill.
Arguing Trump’s deception is easy, the man lies constantly, even his supporters will admit that.
As to why his supporters supposedly ‘vote against their interests’, that’s begging the question. Tariffs, climate mitigation, immigration, increasing minimum wage, decreasing taxes, what-have-you, each policy either makes people's lives worse, or better. Which one it is is not obvious to you, me, trump, or the voters. That’s why we discuss and vote on the stuff.
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The issue here is that if you are someone who makes their living providing labour, it's a very bad thing for you to have more labour in the pool.
If a job needs to be done, and I am one of the few people who can do it, I have much better leverage than if I am one of the many people who can. This is a very classic leftist argument (see union shops).
On a personal note, housing is one of the areas where it really affects me. 25 years ago, the house my parents bought was a 5 bed 2 bath with an unfinished basement for $200000. With 2% inflation, it would be around $375000 today. Instead, it's around $3000000. At the same age my parents were moving into a great home in a wonderful neighborhood, I'm moving into a tiny condo in a cheaper city, for over double the cost of the house I grew up in. I am Canadian, as I've mentioned before - so the level of immigration I've seen is way above that of the US. But it's one of those problems that scales linearly over time - the more people you allow in without increasing services (everything from doctors, employees at the local DMV, all the way down to lanes on roads), the more everyone who needs those services has their quality of life decrease.
Edit: A word, I meant "Decrease", not "Improve".
Yes. But the influx of people also means that now two jobs need to be done, and you're no worse off. That's the core of the argument — there is more labor, but there is also more work to be labored on.
Same goes for housing — new people? They are willing to pay for building more houses!
Of course, the time horizons and other restrictions do matter. I'm not saying that the housing market isn't broken, or that sudden shifts in worker availability do not have temporary effects. What I am saying is that blaming it on immigration is not an accurate model of reality — and, even more importantly, Trump is exploiting that for his personal gain.
But I mean, this is not what we actually see; what you are expressing is what we keep getting told will be the case with immigration, but somehow never actually seems to materialize. When I was a child, I had a family doctor; now, I'm part of roughly 20% of my province that does not, and the lineup to get a family doctor is in the range of years. When I was a kid, the weekly grocery bill was around $100 CAD for a 5 person family per week; it's now around $100 CAD for a single person. This is far in excess of nominal inflation.
The time horizons matter too; I'm currently 33, and moving into a place that is not big enough to raise a family. If the immigration jobs end up stabilizing in 5 years, I'll be 38; if I wanted a family with 5 kids, I'm kind of out of time at that point. It doesn't actually matter to me if everything will be better in 5 years; I only have one life.
I think your theories only make sense if the only immigration is net contributors (people who are likely to pay more taxes than they consume); however, Canada supports both spousal unification, as well as family unification (including the extremely elderly). We also have an average wage of $49000 for new immigrants (as opposed to the $55000 for native Canadians). As such, the immigrants are literally making us poorer on a per-person basis, driving up the cost of our resources that cannot grow at the same pace as immigration (housing, health care), and bringing their racial and ethnic tensions to our streets. Our GDP may be higher than it would've without them; but that doesn't help when my wage doesn't go up, and everything is more expensive (and in Canada, our GDP per capita has actually gone down).
You describe genuine issues. But the question is: Are these really caused by immigration? I mean it, for real. You can have the firmest belief in the perception that these issues are causes by immigration. But reality simply does not care what you believe. What if you seriously entertain the possibility that you could be wrong on this? What if stopping immigration simply doesn't do anything on the above issues?
That is the essence of my point: There is a good chance that the issues in housing and health care that you are experiences are not caused by immigration, and — there are people out there who want to profit from your belief on this matter, that's what my quote by Henry George is about. Trump is such a person.
I mean, to turn the question on it's head - is there any evidence that would persuade you that it is caused (or at least, worsened) by immigration? From my perspective, it doesn't have to be caused solely by it in order for it to be aggrevating the situation.
An important thing to remember is that Canada has had approximately 1/8 of its residents added in the last 5 years (2019 census has 37.5 million population, 2024 has 41.8, but there was also a report that approximately 1 million people had overstayed their visas). During that time, I've seen housing prices go up by around 65%. (The place I'm buying was last listed at 315k in 2019, and is 485 today). The housing market began to get out of control with Harper, who dramatically expanded the TFW program; with Trudeau, who went into overdrive with TFW and international students, it became way worse.
Every province in Canada is currently suffering from this, regardless of their provincial leaders. We've had a dramatic increase in coethnic violence, including marches to support Hamas and similar groups.
We had a fairly big outrage recently over Indian international students raiding food banks for meals - this directly reduces the resources available for our population that uses them (which has gone up to about 20% of the population).
Do you think it's possible that immigration could be making things worse for the average person? I can't find you definitive proof that this is the sole cause of every word, because it isn't - all I can do is show you the ways we can see direct negatives from it.
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Put bluntly, the people around me who get busted stealing catalytic converters from cars and stabbing women in the ass with box cutters aren't named McDonald or Orbison.
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If immigrants were coming in across all income levels in proportion to the host country, then it would be economically equal to births. But instead,:
https://americancompass.org/jobs-americans-would-do/
Yes. The article goes on, and notes
This is not an argument against immigration — it's actually one for controlled immigration. I don't think that this is what Trump's current policies have in mind, though.
By the way, the main issue with high-wage segments is that they have entry control — you (probably, I think) need a degree in law, medicine, from a US school … in order to enter that segment. In other words, these segments have active import restrictions. Likewise, illegal immigration cannot happen into high-wage segments — you may get away with working illegally on a construction site, but as a registered medical doctor? No chance.
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Not the poster you are responding to, but there are some cities in Europe now where, if I go outside, I am mostly among young men who are dressed and act to signal capacity for violence, have strong ingroup bias among themselves, and communicate (often exclusively) in languages that I have little to no knowledge of. I think it is appropriate to be on one's guard in such a situation, and to adjust one's general course of action to take the attendant risks into account; and I think that this adjustment should count as a personal harm.
I do not think this is true at the level of "cities" anywhere in Europe*. There are definitely neighborhoods it applies to - particularly for me in the UK as an RP speaker with no understanding of Geordie, Scouse and other similar languages spoken by violent sub-groups of the indigenous population in the chavlands, which are considerably more dangerous than the so-called "no-go zones" of Tower Hamlets.
I am told that there is a small number of cities in the United States where this phenomenon is true across most of the city - again due to a violent subgroup of the indigenous population that speaks a barely-intercomprehensible dialect. And yes I am talking about Ebonics.
* Malmo is the most Islamised city in Europe, and is roughly 1/3 Muslim, and (separately - there are Swedish-born Muslims and non-Muslim immigrants) 2/3 Swedish-born. I am prepared to defer to anyone who has actually spent more than a few days there as to whether this is enough that a majority of neighbourhoods fit 4bpp's criterion.
This was specifically my experience in the city center of Bochum, Germany, when I went there for a few days last year. Up until then, I also believed that German anti-immigration people were being overly dramatic or duplicitous seeing how it is not like that except in a few known problematic suburbs in other cities I had been to even recently).
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Can't speak on Malmö, but keep in mind that superficial numbers like x/y Muslim only tell part of the tale. Look also at the demographic pyramid, if you want pure statistics, or just go outside and have a look. See who's actually present in the street, who speaks most loudly, who blasts their music out for everyone to hear. It's not the aged, docile native populations. And it's far from being a phenomenon confined to a handful of affected cities. Small towns and even villages in rural Germany see the same rapid development, and simply pointing at statistics does nothing to change what my lying eyes show me.
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I happen to live near a neighborhood with such tendencies. But is that a consequence of immigration for failed policy for integrating immigrants? For example, if these people are not allowed to work legally — they have to resort to criminal work (drugs) to make a living. It looks like the very attempt to actively restrict illegal immigration is making this perceived problem worse.
I can see how "ingroup of young men with foreign language" tends towards harm. But that's not quite the same as "harm of immigration".
I'm not particularly inclined to accept argumentation that amounts to "thing A is negative-value, but if we also did thing B (which, for whatever reason, we are not actually going to do), then the expected value would be positive, so we ought to do thing A". Apart from the circumstance that the case that successful integration is in fact possible has not been made convincingly, this seems like it is prioritising some sort of "fairness" ("it wouldn't be fair if immigration advocates can't get immigration; after all it is not their fault that immigration is bad") over utility. I don't even particularly buy such a "fairness" argument on its own terms, because in the European context I still remember that before the current wave of immigration, either the very same people who are now arguing for more unconditional immigration or their political ancestors were actively agitating against integration measures, which they saw as cultural chauvinism.
(In the countries I have lived, at least, I am not convinced that the young men I have seen were not allowed to work legally. Many of them were likely to be second-generation immigrants and living in neighbourhoods were evident relatives and associates were running physical storefronts, and Europe is not the sort of place where you can do this without the state taking note.)
The argument is that "A non-zero amount of A is happening whether you like it or not, so let's also do B". It's not an argument for unconditional A.
The US in the 19th century looks like a case of successful integration to me.
The level of immigration was much lower, and well, Boston wasn't originally an Irish city.
The 19th century immigration was just as bad as everyone at the time said it was. There was no integration or assimilation, not really, but there was a suppression of language. The Irish are still Irish, the Italians still Italian, and the Germans still German. They still vote in their characteristic manner.
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I'm absolutely for doing more of the B here. The most obvious way to do this is things like mandatory native language classes, breaking up immigrant communities and disincentivising immigrant culture expression. Would we still be on the same page there?
"A non-zero amount of A is happening whether you like it or not" is neither an argument that reducing the amount of A is impossible, nor an argument that reducing the amount of A would be bad.
...of various fairly similar European immigrants, as well as smaller number of Asian ones that come from cultures that did not have a track record of decades to centuries of national dysfunctionality and clan and sectarian warfare. Few people anywhere are complaining about mass European or East Asian immigration. On the other hand, a large portion of the African slaves that were imported and actually basically stripped of their original cultures are still not exactly what one would call integrated.
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Let's say that I have a knife wound on my arm. If I get a hammer and then break my arm in an attempt to treat the knife wound, is this evidence that attempting to treat injuries is a bad idea that just makes injuries worse?
Restricting illegal immigration means that these people are deported or otherwise not in the country. Keeping them in the country but legally prohibiting them from working is the exact situation that most immigration opponents are trying to avoid, because illegal guest workers lack worker protections and violate the society-wide bargain between labour and capital. The best answer is to vigorously enforce laws against employing them and to simultaneously send them home.
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This is generally not the problem in Europe.
"Leftism cannot fail, it can only be failed", and besides, the requirement to do something for integration is a negative consequence.
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We have an extremely large class of laborers in Texas who are not allowed to work legally. They are tilted male and are far from the most overrepresented group in our crime stats(although they do commit more crimes than native whites). As it turns out, high income economies typically have the ability to absorb more labor than they can generate, and where there's a will there's a way.
Few of these people make it into the middle class, but most of them earn a living through day labor, construction, agriculture, or other shit work which is used to employing the underclass- and often finds illegals a refreshing change of pace who steal less and show up for work more reliably and soberly than natives interested in the jobs they actually do.
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I think the general harm is more of a human capital / social capital / cultural capital issue overall.
Mass immigration risks eroding the culture and trust that built so much wealth and dominated the world. That’s a bad thing if it does happen. It’s not guaranteed, but mass immigration of low skill and low IQ people is one way to get there.
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This is clearly an accurate model of reality in theory - a finite amount of land cannot support an infinite amount of people. Malthus was wrong in his concrete predictions about agriculture because he did not take into account technological increases. But as a model of reality, it's correct that the land can only support a certain amount of people through agriculture - it's just that we are tremendously efficient now.
I won't speak for 2rafa as to how immigration harms him/her, but I find it interesting that the general argument against immigration you mention isn't one that I commonly hear. In fact (going to how wrong Malthus in fact was) I don't think I have ever heard anyone argue seriously that the United States can't accept more immigrants because we will run out of food. Housing, maybe, but not food.
But in the most basic sense of the word, a job is a piece of work that needs to be done — and the immigrants bring that in as well, because they also need lettuce and tooth brushes and haircuts. The underlying issue is not that there's isn't enough work that people can do for each other — if anything, it's that creating a job is typically done by an employer, who needs to be reasonably competent and has their own interests.
I would relish the extinction of human labor, because then I don't have to work anymore and could relish my free time will still being provided with all the services that I need. The issue is not that work goes extinct, the issue is that I, as a lowly peasant do not profit from the work saved — but that's a problem of distribution of wealth. And that's what I also find mind-boggling about voting for Trump — he is so rich that he doesn't have to work anymore, yet promises the restricting immigration will solve my, the peasant's problem, rather than redistributing his very own capital? I don't know, but that looks like deception to me.
Sorry to pile on here, as I'm already engaging with you in a different thread; wouldn't your theories only make sense in a hypothetical world where we had an extremely high labour force engagement? Like, if we only have around 65% of the population of working aged individuals engaging in the labour market, doesn't that imply that adding a marginal person does not generate a marginal job (but rather, 65% of one)?
I don't think so? I don't quite understand which theory specifically you mean, my immediately preceding post contains two. On the first one: The marginal person generates demand for labor and adds supply of labor. The 65% figure would be about the supply of labor. If you want to draw conclusions about the demand for labor — which can be entirely different from that figure — you need additional data. For example, you could try to argue that it's a closed system, where labor supply and demand are equal; but with exports, imports, and profit margins, this is not a closed system.
The second theory is about the utilization of the supply of labor. Labor works for some company, which takes a cut of the produced value and pays out the rest as wage. The company could choose to pay higher wages — but they don't.
Perhaps the following calculations illustrates what I mean: A marginal person of working age offers 1 person of labor, but the labor that they demand in order to stay fed and bedded may only be, say, 0.5 persons due to automation. If this single person were a closed loop, there is no good reason for this person to work more than 0.5 persons worth of labor — that will be enough to feed themselves.
If human labor goes extinct, this means that this person would only demand ~0 people worth of labor — nobody has to lift a finger to keep this person well-fed, it's all taken care of by AI growing corn and mowing the lawn.
The trouble is that this person is not a closed loop — they don't have access to that AI growing corn, they have to pay an exorbitant fee. That's the issue about "work saved" that I mean, and the thing that Henry George pointed out in "Progress and Poverty".
The math doesn't pan out exactly in this way, because automation changes what constitutes human labor, so you can get the work of 90 people from year 856 for the price of 1 crane driver and 1 crane in the year 2025. Work saved means that each person can do more, but that in turn may lead to demanding more.
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What is Trump's personal net worth as a proportion of the total resources available to and under the control of the US government?
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Why would something need to harm you personally for you to be justified in being against it?
I'm not particularly aware of any other category of harm that requires that- certainly you can be anti-murder without being murdered, anti-theft if you aren't the one being stolen from, and so on. Nor does your family have to have suffered, or your close friend group, or your extended friend group, or any other varient of increasingly extended relations. Some of the evils of history are stopped not by those who personally suffered, but those who were entirely orthoganal (outside intervention) or even responsible (anti-colonialism movements).
It would seem by plethora of examples that [things that harm others] is also a valid basis of prioritizing issues. At which point, the condition of 'personally' is just semantic gerrymandering.
That's a fair point. But there is a difference between being "anti-murder" and being "anti-immigration", because "murder" is obviously violating the bodily integration of a person, whereas it's more difficult to argue that "immigration" is harmful on a personal level — that's what I wanted to hone in on by using the word "personally", though missed the mark by being too specific on the interlocutor.
It's not more difficult if you don't insist on semantic gerrymandering. It does not matter if it is harmful on a 'personal' level- it matter if it harms, period, because all harms are personal on some level.
Indirect economic harms are still economic harms. Harms to social trust by unilateral disregard of legitimate laws is still harm to social trust. Criminal harms by criminals who partisans protected from deportation because they wanted to spite or defy their outgroup are still harms. Self-righteous support for human trafficking that corresponds with the significant smuggling of addictive and harmful substances that fund violent criminal groups domestically and abroad even as the smuggled migrants compete with citizens for public goods and services while disrupting local social equilibriums is a whole host of harms to be encountered by various people in various ways at various times.
If you want to argue that immigration doesn't harm anyone, then just say immigration doesn't harm anyone. But if you can't do that because it wouldn't be believable, don't try to introduce a qualifier that only serves to disqualify all the types of harm that might be relevant to others.
No. Indirect economic "harms" are trade-offs. For example, if the price of chocolate rises, then some people cannot afford the amount of chocolate they used to buy. That's not a harm — yes, the chocolate buyer is worse off, but there is a chocolate producer on the other end, who would in turn be worse off if the price were lower.
I'm after a precise definition of "harm" here, because that's relevant to my core values, Humanism. Do not harm human beings. One primary source of harm is loss of integrity of your own body (being subject to violence, …). Higher chocolate prices are ok, a threat to your existence is not. Let me call it "bodily harm" for the sake of discussion. (At some point, economic
I would agree that these are either bodily harms or do border on bodily harms, yes. But the point is: Are these caused by immigration — or are these caused by how immigration is handled?
Much of what you are attributing to "immigration" is actually "consequence of current handling of immigration". This is a policy question. The thinking that you can stop people who are very desperate does not work out.
This is not about outgroups, this is about core value, humanism: Do not inflict bodily harm on other people, regardless of whom.
Many economic trade-offs are harmful. You are aware of this, hence why your economic example is of someone not getting a luxury confectionary, as opposed to someone losing their job, losing access to affordable housing, having to live in less-safe / more dangerous neighborhoods, enduring significant stresses and related health and social consequences due to economic consequences that benefit other people.
And this is without further accounting for the not 'just' economic changes that can accompany macroeconomic changes, such as changes to culture, crime rates, and various other things that come with the macroeconomic trends and hurt people.
No, you may not, because the discussion is that you do not get to waive aside harms on the basis of semantic gerrymandering just because you do not want to acknowledge that your policy preferences hurt people, but you don't want outright admit you find that acceptable. You especially don't get to on the basis of a 'core value' that is routinely violated by both any action or inaction at a policy level.
Don't dodge the discussion, make your stand: does mass migration cause no harm, or does it cause harms but you are okay with that?
This is not a bodily harm — but the consequence of not being able to buy food is a bodily harm. The point is that under different policy choices, losing your job does not imply that you can't feed yourself anymore, the two can be decoupled.
Agreed. Losing access to housing is a bodily harm. Violence in the neighborhood is a bodily harm.
What I'm saying is that different policy choices that are unrelated to migration will do more to prevent the above bodily harms. The claim "immigration is harm" is different from the combination of effects "immigration does X", and "X does bodily harm" — a policy choice can affect X instead.
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Perhaps the clearest case here is animal welfare. I care about the issue a lot, and no-one would normally think it relevant to ask me “How does animal suffering affect you personally?”
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