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I think the only reason the US doesn't do what it needs to do about the border is because doing what it takes to actually solve the border crisis would make America look bad in international affairs. Russia and China would have tons of propaganda pictures and stories about how horrible the US is, and the left wing press in the US would be happy to help. The empire and securing global markets is what is most important to American elites, and illegal migration just isn't a huge issue to people who can afford to live in nice areas and send their kids to good schools. The only way to stop illegal immigration would be to replace the entire US government with people that don't give a shit if securing the border makes them look bad and hurts the US's standing abroad. They'd just tell other government to fuck off if they tried criticizing them about it and jail leftists who try to stir up shit domestically. But we don't live in that world so nothing can reasonably be done about it.
The best explanation of the illegal immigration topic that I've encountered online is probably this paragraph from 2016
The political/managerial class directly benefits from illegal immigration, they're not going to do anything about it until they're forced to.
The "drive down wages" thing does not make sense, economically. When an illegal immigrant does repair work on your house, sure, he lowers the wages of a native repairman, but he also gives you a cheaper repair. When an illegal immigrant picks berries, he substitutes for a native picker, but the price of berries goes down (because food markets are quite competitive!) In order for this to make sense, 'the elites' would have to be capturing all of the value of illegals, somehow, despite the competitive marketplace. This is theoretically possible, but I don't see much evidence!
Also, to steal a left-wing argument, do you support the workers rights that illegals are supposedly undermining? Like, 15 dollar an hour minimum wage, strong unions (no right to work laws, state-mandated bargaining), etc.
I don't know, man. I used to make these arguments myself, but I don't feel like we're swimming in abundance since we let it rip with the globalism. The only class of goods I feel is more available is electronics, and maybe cars. If the price for that is the absolute gutting of manufacturing and farming jobs in my country, I'm not convinced it has been worth it.
I agree with them in spirit, I'm not convinced about them in practice.
In my experience and also (i think) the statistics, 'durable consumer goods' have gotten significantly cheaper. Definitely more slowly than in the past.
From FRED, "all employees, manufacturing" / "all employees" has been flat at 8.5% since 2000 after a fairly linear decline from 38% since 1940ish. I am very confident goods are cheaper now than they were in 1970 and 1940. This probably is just meaningless because these numbers don't mean what i'm guessing they do but durable consumer goods CPI / total CPI has dropped 43% since 2000 and 20% since 2010. So just intuitively by glancing at the graph (and this isn't a strong argument as a result, you'd want a more detailed understanding of what happened) I don't find 'less manufacturing jobs so higher prices' to be correct
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Everyone else also benefits from illegal immigration; American meat prices are artificially low because illegal immigrants staff the slaughterhouses for wages Americans won’t take. Houses are nicer than they ‘should’ be because the illegal immigrant laborers take a pay cut compared to natives. Etc, etc.
This isn’t a simple ‘business owners vs heartland workers’ story, the typical American consumer benefits from cheap labor for jobs that spoiled Americans don’t want to do anyways.
You haven't actually done anything to refute the claim that the benefits and drawbacks of illegal immigration aren't evenly distributed. I agree that these people benefit slightly from employers breaking the law and cutting down costs by hiring illegal immigrants, but the idea that those benefits actually match up to what the people in question have lost and are losing is just farcical.
Yeah, Americans don't want to work in illegal conditions that violate labour laws - this doesn't make them spoiled!
That's not what you said, you said:
This implies they drive down wages and advance the interests of employees in general. This is not true. They drive up the value of the wages of most americans, while driving down the wages harming of the interests of workers in the specific sectors immigrants work in. And in such a way that, if there were tax increases and redistribution to specific native workers, everyone would have more 'value'.
And given that, the paragraph doesn't make any sense!
(This is totally separate from IQ, culture, race, etc arguments about immigration, and doesn't disprove them at all)
No, it implies they drive down wages, as opposed to salaries. There's a clear distinction there and it actually matters for this particular topic - people on salaries BENEFIT from wage suppression, because wages are a component in the costs of services/goods that they consume. I'm more than happy to keep talking about this, but you'd probably be best served by reading the article I was quoting from first - https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/
Do you have a more data-oriented source on the economic claims here? My sense is that if immigration pushes down wages in a few specific sectors, the benefits are diffuse enough that the income for the natives in that sector decreases. But people who work for wages are >50% of the working population, so the harms in terms of lower wages from immigration aren't actually 100x as concentrated as the benefits anymore. And (poorly justified guess) this either washes out or is net beneficial because the immigrants are providing useful services and the population of wage workers isn't, like, doubling.
Also note that if we were taking in as many skilled immigrants as unskilled, this wouldn't be an effect at all - because all skill classes would increase in proportion. And ... I'm not actually sure if that's even false? If you combine illegal and hispanic immigration with the disproportionately skilled immigration from india, asian countries, etc.
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That might be part of the reason, but I think another big part of the reason is that US citizens are not going to go pick berries, work in slaughterhouses, or do yard work for $7/hr. Illegal immigrants in the US are an important part of the economy.
Illegal immigrants are an important mechanism of wage suppression, asset inflation and shifting the outcome of elections, and I think US society would be substantially improved if the hiring of illegal immigrants was made into an offence which explicitly pierced the corporate veil and lead to such extensive asset seizures and punitive prison sentences that every single illegal immigrant was unemployed overnight in fear of said regulations.
I get where you're coming from, but Americans keep voting for politicians who don't do that. They keep voting for politicians who either think that it shouldn't be done or politicians who say it should be done but then don't try very hard to actually do it.
Polls for decades have shown that Americans are very against illegal immigration, but we only have two parties and neither will do anything about it. They finally voted in Trump and they pulled out all the stops. He tries to limit Muslim immigration and some judge in Hawaii shuts it down. He doesn't get his wall either. The fact is there is nothing Americans can do to stop illegal and mass immigration short of a coup. I'm not saying that to fed post, but just using common sense. How else could Americans stop illegal immigration if elected officials, the media, and the deep state prevent anyone from really doing anything about it?
Trump could (and should) have sicced federal law enforcement on the businesses that knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Everyone knows who does it, everyone knows where the live, and they have attachable assets. Illegal immigration sceptics on both sides of the political fence know that this would work, and that more security on the border probably wouldn't (not least because ~1/2 of all illegal residents were originally overstayers and not border-jumpers). The vast majority of illegal immigrants come to the US to work illegally, and if people stopped employing them they would stop coming.
He didn't, because businesses which employ illegal immigrants are a key GOPe constituency, and at that point he was still trying to work with the GOPe. And the MAGA base didn't care.
We still see far more people calling for fences and deportations than we do calling for universal e-Verify. I despise people who try to psychoanalyze political opponents, so I am not going to speculate on why this is. But part of the reason why politicians (even Trump) don't actually try to reduce illegal immigration is that the voters who say they want less illegal immigration don't expect them to.
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By prioritizing the issue (as @WhiningCoil pointed out in https://www.themotte.org/post/780/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/166846?context=8#context, while Americans care about these issues they might not tend to prioritize them) and consistently voting for politicians who will act on the issue.
I'm sorry, but that's just straight up not true. The US doesn't have a system where people can vote on issues straight up, but when they have been given the chance, they have voted against illegal immigration. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_California_Proposition_187
Within days, the deep state shut it down. Just like Trump's Muslim ban by some judge in Hawaii or his wall. It is literally impossible to stop illegal immigration democratically in the United States. If it was possible, it would have ended by now.
I don't think it's impossible. People would just have to consistently vote for politicians who actually prioritize the matter. But Americans for the most part, even if they want to stop illegal immigration, do not care about the issue enough to make it a dealbreaker when it comes to who they vote for.
The problem is even when they vote for politicians who say they will oppose illegal immigration, those politicians often turn out to be liars when they get to Washington.
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Wouldn't a better idea be to fix the US economy so it doesn't require importing countless poor people to work unpleasant jobs reliant on the fact that they aren't here legally and therefore have no right to a liveable wage?
A better idea from whose perspective? The cheap labor benefits American consumers, and the wage being paid is more than said importee would get in their home nation presumably.
So both sides have reasons not to "fix" it. From a free market perspective its a win win.
Well from my perspective, for starters. Is that your perspective then, a free market perspective? Because that wasn't the impression I got from any of your other posts. Other posts I've read of yours gave me the impression you would oppose the exploitation of people living in poverty so Americans can keep their suvs and dollar cheeseburgers.
Also I recall a different response the last time America got a bunch of cheap laborers and gave them just enough to make them better off than they would have been in their home nation.
I am a neo-liberal with authoritarian leanings i would say.
I think exploitation often depends on whether the people being exploited are happy with it.
Having said that i am also sympathetic to the idea that neo-liberal free markets need to be directed and regulated by the state. I think off shoring manufacturing has caused a lot of hardship for working class Americans in the Rust Belt et al.
So probably my position would be importing cheap labourers is ok as long as they are treated reasonably well and are themselves happy with their wages, which i guess is close to the free market position, or comparative advantage. But that manufacturing should be on-shored for the good of the American populace even though that will also raise prices, because the impact on poor Americans is disproportionate.
So I guess, let market forces reign but with a heavy state hand regulating them, for an optimum balance of economic and human thriving.
I would be on board with this if we weren't talking about illegal, undocumented, non-citizens. I would actually be ok with indentured servitude if it was between consenting adults. But the system as it stands seems almost designed to be abused.
Sure, some kind of easy legal immigration for low paid workers would probably be better. But I don't see that being politically feasible currently.
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I'd go so far as to say none of that is necessary, if the laborer knows what they're getting into.
I'd hope I count as a skilled worker, but I can also accept "cheap", since my wages in the UK would be a pittance compared to the US, an electrician in the US can easily make triple what a junior doctor does in the former. Further, I'm not remotely happy with said salary as provided by a monopsony employer, and I think calling the conditions NHS doctors labor under as "treated well" to be a farce.
None of that prevents me from leaving, I still consider it a step up, albeit a modest one, from being a doctor in India.
I'm also entirely OK with less skilled workers, such as those in construction or domestic care, who go to places with less than stellar rights and conditions like the Middle East from even less stellar, not even planetary, conditions as found in the Indian subcontinent. Would it be nice if they were paid better and treated better? Sure, but believe me that the silent majority will accept that as a reasonable tradeoff when it means they make 5 to 10 times what they could back home, thus having actual savings while sending remittances back home.
I'd know, I was one of the doctors at a Qatari Visa Center, and there were plenty of people who were eager to resume their posts after their visas expired and they had to come back. I'm sure many of them were mislead by touts about how cushy it was there, but they're not the norm.
In other words, as long as people make the tradeoff with a decent level of insight, and ideally it's a step up from where they began, I can hardly begrudge them their movements.
One of the reasons why I don't call myself an outright Libertarian despite being very sympathetic to that position is that I see clear utility from having states around to do things that the free market doesn't (as well as fuck things up, but my position is that we should find where we can maximize benefits and minimize downsides from having both).
Especially in matters of national security, you need to have a big stick to prevent companies from selling out or doing end-runs, such as Nvidia after the executive order banning export of high-end GPUs to China.
Sadly, while I sometimes wish otherwise, governments are usually good to have around, not that I'd mind less of it in many places.
I actually have sympathy for Libertarians myself. I think their positions are generally logical, consistent and principled. Unfortunately much like with communism, i don't think their ideas will actually work in practice with actual people.
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I think that would be better for US citizens, but the politicians do not care much what I think and Americans keep electing the same kind of politicians over and over again.
That kind of apathy is the biggest issue though. Because it's one step above acceptance - you already present exploitation as a fait accompli, like Americans are physically incapable of picking berries or doing yard work or paying a reasonable rate for those tasks, when the exploitation is why they refuse to do those things. Why would a politician act any differently?
I don't mean that to sound personal, I'm part of the problem too. It's such a massive and ingrained problem at this point that it seems almost impossible to fix.
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This is a theory of international relations where America is bidding against themselves in an auction. The rest of the world largely does not just let illegal immigration happen. But they largely do like free trade. A few countries might say hypocrisy or something but if we just change the rules and say countries don’t need to take refugees then everyone will agree with us. America is constantly hypocritical in international relations.
If we banned illegal immigrants but pushed free trade everyone is just going to follow along.
I think a better theory is that most elites just don’t recognize hbd. They don’t realize many of these immigrants won’t assimilate. They think they will be like the Italians and Irish who just became white Americans. They support immigration because they think it’s a huge utility gain for both sides to have more people following western norms. You average Syrian refugees kids will become Frenchmen who pray at Mosques and your average subsaharan African will have kids who become Harvard educated Doctors is how they think it will play out.
Yeah, people come up with all kinds of theories about really complicated political schemes and intrigues but history shows that elites for the most part are not super-human Machiavellian manipulators, even if they would like to be. I think that they certainly are a bit smarter than non-elites on average, but for the most part they are not genius-level political masterminds from a comic book.
The simpler explanation is that to the average left-leaning elite, HBD = racism and racism = bad, end of story. And to the average right-leaning elite, HBD might make a bit of sense but it's not the sort of thing one brings up in polite company and anyway who cares, it's not like my mansion is going to be besieged by mobs of illegal immigrants any time soon.
I would also note that in America, illegal immigrants actually do assimilate pretty well on average. America's chief racial divide has to do with a group of people who have been living here for hundreds of years and whose ancestors got kidnapped and forced to work by America's founders. In Europe, which does not have the guilt that comes with something like that, and which deals with immigrants who assimilate less well on average than Latin American immigrants do in the US, political voices that are in favor of less third-world immigration are actually doing pretty well right now. For example, /r/europe is basically far-right on this topic by Reddit standards.
I share your thoughts. I don’t have a huge problem with illegal immigration in the US for the most part. Hispanics tend to assimilate in the ways they are ok. Generally they haven’t matched IQ testing or educational attainment but second and third generation have reduced criminality to the US white level. But the immigrants Europe gets I am not sure that will be achieved.
Hispanics who have assimilated still vote Democrat at rates far beyond those of average Americans.
Who are assimilated Hispanics, though? Second generation Californians whose ancestors came over in the early 80s, or 15th generation Texan ranchers who still have a vaguely Hispanic last name? White Cubans, or 90% indigenous Mayans? They’re a pretty heterogenous group in a way that ‘pure’ Irish or Swedish Americans aren’t.
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They could stop illegal immigration if they wanted to though. This isn't some impossible task. There just isn't political will among the elites. Pakistan deported over a million Afghans: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/pakistans-plan-expel-over-1-million-afghans-living-country-illegally-2023-10-31/
Are you trying to tell me the US couldn't do this if they wanted to? The government just doesn't want to for [insert reason here]. You didn't agree with mine, which is fine, but I hope you don't think the US actually couldn't if there was the political will.
And I mean they kind or are Machiavellian manipulators, considering it's an extremely unpopular thing politically yet they've managed to let mass immigration go on for over 4 decades, completely reshaping the demographics permanently of this country. Trump got elected to finally do something about it, and he was unable to do anything to curb it. Part of that is on Trump's incompetence, but more of it is that very powerful people and institutions resisted and thwarted him every time.
One of my favourite trolls is to ask people who claim that this would be an impossible task to just go on the record as saying that it'd be impossible for a government to round up and deport (or otherwise deal with) 6 million people.
I don't think the government with the silly mustache guy and the Hindu good luck symbol cared if they accidentally rounded up a small number of non-Eskimos as collateral damage - particularly because they were mostly rounding up and deporting citizens of defeated enemy countries. A single citizen deported by mistake is enough to sink a mass-deportation programme in a Western democracy (and probably should be).
This happened in the UK with the Windrush Scandal. The problem is particularly bad in the UK because the mess created by changing citizenship laws as the British Empire as dismantled - the scandal concerned people who immigrated from the Caribbean before their birth countries became independent (and were therefore born and remained British and never crossed a border) or between independence and 1973 (in which case they lost British citizenship when their home countries became independent, but were not subject to British immigration control and therefore would have arrived without paperwork). But I'm sure the INS has had paperwork screwups similar to the UK decision to destroy the old disembarkation records in 2010 which left us unable to work out which long-resident undocumented Caribbean immigrants were citizens, which ones were legal permanent residents, and which ones were deportable.
Historically, the US has not tried to maintain a central register of everyone in the country legally such that it would be easy to only deport the right people - and the people who favour mass deportations generally think that keeping such a register would be tyrannical overreach.
I appreciate the historical information - thank you for giving me some interesting material to read and learn about. However I have to disagree with a point you've made in your last paragraph. Specifically...
This isn't actually true anymore, and hasn't been for a while. The NSA's surveillance and profiling system most likely has a flag for whether or not someone's an illegal immigrant, and if it doesn't it would be able to add one in seconds. The sheer amount of data and processing they have, along with their access to Meta and Google's advertising databases means that they'd be able to organise the deportation and identify the illegals in a single SQL query.
Those people are correct! That doesn't change anything about it already existing, however.
Winston Smith was born in 1970 in a poor rural county which never digitised its birth records. He has never had a passport. The SSA has long-since lost any copies they kept of the documents he submitted when he first applied for an SSN in 1986.
Yossarian was brought to the US by his parents as a teenager in 1983. His shitlib high school guidance councillor helped him acquire an SSN in 1986 using the US birth certificate of a baby who died shortly after being born in 1970. (Back then birth and death certificates were not positively matched, so you could use a dead person's birth certificate). His parents' visas have long since expired, and they were out of status when they died in the 1990s.
How does the NSA know which one is a US citizen and which one is an illegal?
The problem with a mass roundup-and-deport is with corner cases like these, not people who entered the country on a 4-year visa 5 years ago.
I am not quite sure you understand the depth and level of tracking that's taking place here. This Winston Smith character must have had no interactions with the financial system, no bank account, no driver's license, no on-the-record job, no interaction with the political system at all, no tax events, no phone, no internet usage and no education. How many Mowglis do you think there are in the USA?
You haven't presented anything that their panopticon wouldn't be able to resolve, and even then the amount of reaching you had to do in order to find extreme edge cases that might throw up a challenge means that it would be a trivial job for a single field office to spend a week going through the outliers. How many people do you think fall into those weird edge-case categories? I don't think that number is high enough to make this an actual problem in practice.
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What's the problem? Let them stay if it's ambiguous. The optimal number of illegal immigrants in the country is not zero.
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"They could, and then we'd Nuremberg them and throw their ideas out of the Overton window" doesn't strike me as a solution to immigration, though. Certainly not a final one.
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This seems a correct take, and generalizes to quite a bit of the everyday grumbling we hear about other "unsolvable" problems like homelessness, uninsured drivers, and street crime. Not that the solutions that look bad are always effective, but they are probably moreso than current inaction.
It's not that they would make the US look bad abroad. It's that they'd look bad in the US. There are plenty of people who like the idea of not having to see, e.g., homeless people or immigrants but who aren't going to support actually rounding them up en masse. In many cases weeding them out from the general population would require invasive enforcement policies that would anger voters who support Doing Something. (This is a pervasive element of politics - people like the idea of a problem being fixed or a certain outcome being achieved, but balk at the tradeoffs involved in actually doing it).
Yeah but the rest of the world isn't the leader of the free world. America's narrative is that it is spreading freedom and democracy and human rights. If the border starts looking like the Gaza Strip, homeless people are being carted off to prison etc. you'd see foreign governments take advantage of that. The global elites are more or less in agreement on this issue of immigration too and I think actually truly believe it, so they aren't going to change. They'd be embarrassed among their peers, which I think they care about more than what voters and their fellow countrymen think. The only way to change it would be to replace it with people who are America First i.e. don't care about the U.N. or Western Europe or NGO's opinions. Plus they'd have to tell a bunch of legal organizations to get fucked (foreign and domestic). It would be a massive endeavor.
I do agree that home front is also a problem. Leftists would be agitating and you'd see newspapers like the Guardian crying about it from day one and trying to get sympathy for migrants. You'd either have to have discredited these organizations so much that nobody cares what they think, or straight up jail and beat them into submission. Then you'd also have to have a population that is okay with that as well. Because right now, as soon someone comes into enforce the law, every left wing newspaper in America is going to be talking about kids in cages and people dying at the border with AOC photo ops. It would have to be a whole paradigm shift that is really unreasonable to expect unless something extraordinary happens.
American voters, left or right, do not give two shits about what any of those think. What is important is how American voters regard themselves. Your average middle-class suburban conservative doesn't like immigrants, but they also won't like hearing stories about abusive migrant detention centers or, say, migrants killed up by mines as I've seen advocated for here and elsewhere. You have some hardcore anti-immigrant types who fantasize about CBP shooting asylum seekers, but they're a small minority compared to people who just hope a symbolic middle finger to would-be immigrants will overcome the overwhelming economic incentives and aren't prepared to resort to the inhumane measures or extraordinary costs required for effective immigration enforcement.
This is probably true, but not in the way nativists think. Western countries all share a similarity in that they have a highly educated, aging population that demand standards of living, social security, etc... be maintained (and actually increase) despite declining labor force participation, retirees that are living longer than ever, and a workforce with a disproportionate aversion to manual/menial labor.
The only country of note that has bitten the bullet on avoiding immigration despite the factors above is Japan, and they've paid for it with economic stagnation. Political elites have to try to square the circle, and they've calculated (almost certainly correctly) that even if they're nominally anti-immigrant that they can't afford the political and economic costs of actually cutting off immigration. Again, there might be a minority who is happy with that outcome, but your average voter isn't going to be swayed when the politicians tell them this is what they asked for. So instead you get the status quo - capricious, half-assed enforcement which gets more capricious or more half-assed depending on whether the party in power is notionally against or for immigration.
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Why not? Isn't that exactly what happened with the homeless problem when Xi came to visit California?
No, that was more or less a continuation of standard practice, i.e. disperse homeless encampments when they become too noticeable, but don't actually do anything to address homelessness. It nicely illustrates the point: people don't want to see homeless people or have to deal with them, but they're also not willing to support throwing thousands of people in prison for vagrancy or spend money to build sufficient shelters.
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