This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm going to speak on this mostly from the American perspective because I think the calculus for Europeans is legitimately different. Anyways--
It's interesting that immigrants have only a marginal effect on population aging. That part of the article is well supported, contradicts my priors, and has forced me to update my beliefs.
Everything aside from that core point is worthless. The arguments about cultural and genetic threats are just silly-- but I won't harp on them too much. I think my culture is the best and my genetics are pretty darn good so I'm confident that through the graces of God and Darwin I'll prevail. I can see why people with inferior cultures and genetics would be afraid of immigration but that's not my problem, and anyways over the long run your doom is overdetermined.
But the economic argument is just ridiculous.
Let me start with the calculation that would actually convince me that that any specific immigrant is a net drain:
[Net Tax Income] + [Integral of (ΔGDP PPP + ΔAvg. Wages) over immigrant length of stay] - [Net Welfare Spending] - [Net Harm from Crime] < 0
... generalizing over any group of immigrants.
It's obvious and uncontroversial that that [Net Tax Income (immigrant)] < [Net Tax Income (natural-born citizens)]. And while I've never actually seen it proven, I wouldn't be too surprised if "Net Tax Income" (immigrant)/years in country < "Net Tax Income" (natural-born citizens)/years in country.
I understand that anti-immigrant activists believe that [ΔAvg. Wages] is negative. I disagree but respect that there are consistent a priori arguments in the other direction, and that the a posteriori argument I find convincing is founded on fuzzy, difficult to interpret data.
I understand that anti-immigrant activists believe that [Net Harm from Crime] is very large. I think they've been fooled by media sensationalism, they think I've been fooled by media censorship, we're just never going to agree on this.
I don't blame the article for not convincingly addressing the above points-- those arguments have been rehashed over and over again. But its failures are twofold:
First, it claims to show that [Net Welfare Spending (immigrant)] > [Net Welfare Spending (citizen)], but to do this it uses *blatant accounting chicanery. It treats, "percentage of households receiving welfare" as a proxy for "welfare spending," but that's an obviously terrible idea when not all welfare is created equal. SNAP is cheap, Medicaid paying for a nursing home is definitely not. And-- it treats the benefits received by the citizen children of immigrants as benefits received by immigrants. That's poor-faith sleight of hand. I don't just mean that in the philosophical sense that citizen children of immigrants aren't actually immigrants-- I mean that it double-counts welfare provided to immigrants, but then is careful to treat the results of that welfare-- the economic gains due to education, good childhood nutrition, etc. as being the result of citizens. That's completely unfair. It would be like me trying to argue that this CIS report showing how naturalized citizens receiving welfare at lower rates than American-born citizens is proof that we should naturalize every immigrant immediately-- when of course that report also reflects the fact that naturalization is a long process and by the time you've been in the US for over a decade you've probably become reached a prosperous middle age and become economically established.
(By the way, I got that CIS link from the article itself-- and it was including its numbers as more proof that citizens take less welfare than immigrants. Can you see the logical error here?)
I can envision an article about how inclusive of the cost of their childhood poverty, the children of immigrants have a greater net cost to the government than the children of natives (and therefore that we should discourage immigration for that reason.) But it would have to contend the fact that 2nd generation immigrants make MORE money than the native population-- and therefore also pay more in taxes.
And finally even more egregious than the accounting mistakes, the article doesn't even try to argue that ΔGDP PPP is negative, even though for pro-immigration activists it is our entire raison d'être. I like goods and services. Immigrants make goods and deliver services. Q.E.D. Yes, immigrants receive welfare-- but they also work in the hospitals that supply Medicaid-funded treatments and in the fields that supply SNAP-eligible foodstuffs. Immigrants contribute to the American project not just by paying taxes, but by giving us the things our taxes pay for. In a contrafactual world without immigrants or their children either the economy or inflation or both would have been much worse.
The best the article does is vaguely gesturing toward the direction that national IQs are correlated with GDP per capita, as if this should prove anything. Well to use a term mottists really enjoy, "One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens." I believe that immigration has raised and continues to raise America's GDP PPP per capita. Therefore, I must logically conclude that immigrants are on average smarter than the native-born population. And that's not much of a stretch! Even if I believed that differences in national IQs accurately measured differences in genetic predispositions toward intelligence (I don't, I think they're measuring differences in nutrition, disease rates, and stress-linked epigenetic expression) those differences are actually fairly small, in the grand scheme of things. If you compare the general population to groups self-selected for competence (think engineers, doctors, scientists, etcetera) you see a much larger, much more persistent difference. Immigrants are the ultimate self-selected group. Hell, that article I linked about 2nd generation immigrants making more money than they native population also includes that 2nd generation immigrants end up better educated than the native population. And education is correlated with IQ...
Yes, the article provides a study about national IQ changes... but its trivial to sketch out an argument for ignoring that study. A difference of <=2 points could be noise, could be due to flaws in the design in the PISA test, could be due to a non=representative sampling of students, could be due to differences in language proficiency, could be due to stress-linked epigenetic factors, could be due to any number of things besides an actual genetic difference pre-dispositioning immigrants to have lower IQ. I'm not making an actual counterargument, at this point-- but only because it would be a waste of time to discuss IQ when what actually matters is ΔGDP PPP and you can just measure that directly.
Now, that all ignores the admittedly rather compelling argument that aggregate economic benefit is not the same as personal economic benefit, and that specific individuals may suffer net losses from immigration for whatever reason. I wouldn't want to tell one of the people in the new years New Orleans Muslim terrorist attack that they net-benefited from immigration. But the article doesn't make that argument so I won't bother addressing it.
There is one concession I have to make to the anti-immigration argument, and that it is that asylum applicants/refugees are-- if not necessarily a net loss-- than less economically beneficial than either illegal immigrants or high-skilled immigrants. And that's a problem for Europe, because there are a lot of legitimate asylum applicants they are mandated by morality and international law to accept. But the fact that it's also a problem for America is completely ridiculous! Even if you accept (like I do) that we have a moral imperative to accept economic migrants... there's zero need to give them the support we give to actual refugees. They would happily take long-term work visas instead, with no obligation for America to let them stay here into retirement and pay for their expensive old-age healthcare (unless they upgrade to permanent residency through excellence and hard work.) If I got everything I wanted, we would have a LOT more immigration-- but immigrants would receive less welfare. Legal immigration is good but illegal immigration is WAY better. So the more illegal we can make our immigration-- the fewer responsibilities we require and the fewer the rights we extend-- the better.
(Based on your later discussions, I assume those deltas are meant for measures of the whole country, with and without the immigrant.) What do you want this term to do? For one, you almost certainly want total wages, because the other numbers are also for the whole country and not just one american. And then, GDP already includes wages, so youd be double-counting those. And and, some of that benefit is going to the immigrant himself, you should propably subtract his wage.
Im not sure it is? They are means-tested based on parents means. If we imagine that those children go on to be the same as children of natives, then that would mean we are paying more to produce an ultimately identical citizen. There may be some unfairness insofar as immigrants have more children, but other than that I dont see the problem.
As a general argument, if we could put a copy of the USA somewhere into an empty bit of ocean, do you think that would benefit americans? Because once the aging argument is eliminated, thats like immigration by people just like citizens.
Perhaps I formulated this terms little awkwardly, but it's intended to capture all of:
As I said,
Regardless, that's a separate discussion from the discussion of whether immigrants are net beneficial. If you loan me and my friend a nickel each, and then a week later I pay you a quarter and he pays you a dime, you've received a net benefit from both of us. It is not my position that immigrants and natural-born citizens provide the same net benefit, only that they both, on average, provide a benefit.
Look, education-- nutritional supplementation-- healthcare-- etc. is typically an investment. At least in america, these programs were justified at the time of passage as not just "services" but as a working toward the common benefit. That's not true for all welfare (disability, elder care), and not all investments are good investments. But study after study shows that the cost of investments into childrearing get more-than-repaid over the lifetime of the child by the difference in tax receipts alone.
And also, all of this fails to capture that working-age immigrants already received a massive amount of societal investment in their home countries, and now america gets to benefit for cheap. America and americans didn't need to put in time and effort to raise those immigrants-- they just get them in the middle of their productive years and go from there. If you compare two american babies versus and immigrant and their child, the american babies might later make more money and pay more taxes than the latter pair-- but you have to pay for two sets of education instead of just one.
Yes, absolutely! I would make as many copies of the USA as our biosphere can support, because network effects and economies of scale would combine to raise the living standards in both americas.
People are power. Stealing immigrants from other nations is basically imperialism and that's awesome.
Do you agree with my modified formula and if not, why does your formula measure these correctly?
Fair.
Im not sure they do. Even the government expenditure that isnt directly welfare still does scale with population - more people need more roads etc. So I think (the effects of pure population discussed below aside) that the averge person is breaking even.
That effect exists, but Im not sure its very big. In the limit, returns to scale are constant, and there already are lots of people in the world and even lots of first-worlders.
And there would also be another effect: the two americas would be competing for the same imports and exports the first one currently does. This can be dampened to some degree by different specialisation and such, but those would still be worse than what the current US does, because otherwise theyd already be doing it. I suspect this would a bigger effect than the benefits of pure population.
But even if its not, and this works exactly as you say, the benefit doesnt require the immigrant to go to your contry specifically. If its another one with a similar GDP that you freely trade with, you should get almost all of the benefit. So the US wouldnt lose much from sending its immigrants to Canada; us Europeans could propably turn a profit sending ours to you.
In the geopolitical sense I agree, but thats mostly independent from the other stuff were talking about.
I disagree with your formula but I don't think we have an object-level disagreement... I included the ΔAvg. Wages to capture the anti-immigration argument that immigration lowers wage. If you want to factor out that term because you don't believe they do, then I'm fine with that.
Yes, but not linearly. If for every immigrant we also added an equivalent amount of land that would be true, but densifying population centers means that people increase faster than miles of roads and sewage, and you get to benefit from economies of scale and network effects for providing distribution of food and services.
But it does? America is better than europe because we have a culture and government that makes better use of our human resources. If we leave immigrants in their home countries or send them to other sub-american countries they will be less productive than they would have been as americans. There are also services that are difficult to provide non-locally (e.g., healthcare).
And-- centralization effects are a big deal too. I've worked with a lot of indian software engineers in my time. Some of them have been immigrants to america and some have been outsourced labor. The standard anti-immigrant logic is that this should bring wages down-- but instead, America's software engineering wages are some of the highest on the planet. Having all the engineers here brings all the engineering-buyers here. High supply and competition on both ends makes our overall market for software engineering much more efficient, which raises revenues and wages. Meanwhile, if we stopped allowing engineers-- well, the outsourcing companies are still right there. If we banned immigration and therefore lost our quality and efficiency edge companies would just go elsewhere.
Thats not what its about. What I said is that GDP already includes wages. GDP measures production expenditure, which includes expenditure on wages. If hourly wages go up, ceter paribus GDP goes up. If hours worked go up, ceter paribus GDP goes up. This is also why you should subtract the immigrants own wage - it goes into GDP, but doesnt benefit natives.
If thats true, then is should already be profitable to urbanise the existing population more. And Im not sure it is all that true - as a city grows bigger, it needs more transport per person to still get everyone everywhere at even just the same velocity.
I say that? You get less, but still most. This is important in the political calculus, where there are non-economic objections to immigration, and the size of the benefit matters in addition to the sign. And it matters to all non-american first world countries.
Sure, but people in the non-local jobs are freed up to do those local ones, compensating most of the loss.
Im not sure theyre such a big deal. Maybe without immigration, every person would have gotten the same wage at home, which would lower the average in America but not for americans. So I dont think the higher wages in America relative to other countries are evidence of productivity gains from centralisation. The fact that centralisation occured is evidence for a benefit from it, but doesnt tell us how high it is. Benefits from centralisation, like pretty much all benefits from scale, are asymptotic. The US tech industry it quite big already, it propably wouldnt lose much from being split in halves.
Okay, I understand your argument about double-counting now but this is still wrong. Am immigrant's wage is the measure of how much good they've done. If I pay you $200 to do something, GDP raises by $200 and I receive at least $200 worth of value. Subtracting the wage you recieved obscures that change in value.
It is. That's why existing urban centers are trying to undo suburbanization with denser developments, more walkability, and better transit. And "more transport person" is definitely wrong. As you rise up density thresholds, instead of having fifteen people take fifteen cars you can have 30 people take a single bus. Plus, closely-packed goods and services reduce the need for transportation in general. Instead of everyone having to drive fifteen-thirty minutes to the nearest walmart, they can just walk five minutes to the corner store instead.
I'm not addressing non-economic objections to immigration because they're fundamentally unadressable. I can't make you like immigrants if you don't, no matter how good the economic benefits are, so I'm not going to try. This is just "clash of civilizations" stuff-- I think my beliefs are fundamentally adaptive and yours aren't, I think believing in and executing on xenophilia and liberalism maximizes my own personal power and that of people who share my ideology, and consequently I think we can eventually crush you and yours. I understand that you're going to try and crush me in turn, and don't blame you for that.
They are objectively a huge deal. Centralization effects are the entire reason we have "cities" in the first place instead of being evenly spread across the landscape.
But not subtracting it is an overestimate, unless you think most people produce value equal to double their wage.
Density is for the most part a political decision. More immigrants dont make cities denser, they produce more city at that same density.
Its a weak effect, but if you grow a city at constant density, the average length of trips to similar destinations will increase.
Thats fine, I dont intend to go into them. But we do try to write for a audience broader than ourselves, and its worth mentioning how things may apply to them.
That is a centralisation effect, but a different one than you talked about before, with different margins, and much less bearing on immigration.
That's fair. As I said-- I understood your point about the double counting, but I don't think we have an object-level disagreement. Let's replace the [ΔGDP PPP + ΔAvg. Wages] with a [value of services directly provided by immigrants to natives + inflation avoided - compensation native workers fail to receive because immigrants did their jobs for them] term. It's harder to quantify that exactly-- but I think we can both agree that it's almost certainly highly correlated with ΔGDP PPP. We might have to disagree on the last term if you think it's negative though. I think "avoided compensation" rounds out to ~0 after taking into account the increased demand for services immigrants require and the fact that in an immigrant-heavy economy native workers are still advantaged when it comes to management and high-skill roles even if skills are exactly the same.
There are political decisions that intentionally restrict density-- nimby zoning laws, for example, but they're ineffective at totally preventing density. My city has recently been growing, and as a result I'm seeing empty lots get built up into 4-over-1 apartment buildings. That doesn't just mean more residents, and more traffic-- it means more businesses being supported in the same amount of space.
Look-- do you actually live in a city? Not a suburb-- and actual city? Because it sounds like your experience is just completely at odds with mine.
Not really. There's no fundamental difference between types of immigration, whether the borders being crosses are municipal, state, or national. People aggregate into similar spots for all the same reasons the world over.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link