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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Deport enough immigrants to the point it starts impacting housing prices. Fire a bunch of women who have government jobs taking care of immigrants.

Pushing women out of the workforce, in general, would plausibly be effective. I doubt that any government employs enough specifically in immigration to make a dent.

Also, this might be the first time I’ve seen illegal immigrants blamed for housing demand. Unless you’re suggesting they restrict supply, presumably by making more areas undesirable?

I'm not talking about "illegal immigrants", I'm talking about all immigrants who have been permitted to reside in the hypothetical "a Western country". In London, non-natives are somewhere like 35% of the population. Are you under the impression this does not impact housing prices?

In my (European) country, the majority of the people employed by the government in services related to unemployement and payments related to that are women, and the majority of users of those services are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. I think immigrants take up a disproportionate amount of government work hours and talking specifically about those who work in immigration is shortsighted. Again, we're talking about "a Western country", so I'm not too concerned about the specifics of what happens in the US.

Understood. Yeah, I can see how that’d reduce the number of female-dominated jobs.

Also, this might be the first time I’ve seen illegal immigrants blamed for housing demand.

I'm not sure if this is how it goes in the US, but in Europe illegal immigrants quickly become asylum seekers who the government must provide accommodation for.

In America this almost never happens. Illegal immigrants show up to make minimum wage scrubbing toilets, killing chickens, flipping burgers, picking strawberries, and doing construction. When those opportunities get harder to come by, they quite simply leave. A minority live by crime of some description(usually drug dealing or prostitution), but none are dependent on the government unless they’re being held against their will.

Illegal immigrants actually tend to make life cheaper for locals, in particular lowering the price of meat and raising neighborhood quality at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum.