starmute wrote:
Alright lets do this.
See here's the problem: its called "Free trade". It all intermingles.
A country like China with a vastly different social structure than the US can trade with the United States. This affects every citizen from the highest to the lowest. Different products are shipped to China and some are shipped to the US. Regardless of morality and what workers "should be paid" market forces dictate what we pay people. This affects prices. So if is easier to raise cattle in the United States and the amount of technical labor is low then steaks will be cheap in the United States, whereas in a place like Greenland the price of steak would be rather high.
What does this have to do with our previous discussion? Stay with me. Overseas and in many countries like Mexico the price of labor is cheap. There is a massive income disparity and people do seek to exploit that here. HOWEVER everyone from the highest to the lowest profit from the cheap labor. Ever wonder why your taco bell food is 99 cents?
It's cheaper because we no longer live in the 1800s, where food shortages makes it so you don't get to have oranges mid-winter, and need thousands of peasants working the fields. Saving maybe 50 cents on shitty fast food is not worth permanently losing some of your wages, and having your country filled up with people who refuse to adapt. (Not even going into the crime rates caused by both individuals and the cartels)
That is just a terrible deal to take and the only ones taking it are the rich, who live in gated communities and don't mind if the rest of the country goes to shit. More on international trade later though
The argument
XSI wrote:
"(Also if nobody does it, wages and/or benefits will go up until someone accepts the job. If nobody can be found even with increased wages, then maybe the business wasn't run well enough to survive. That's the free market)"
Doesn't actually apply. If we all the sudden throw out all the immigrants and raise the minimum wage of farm workers to $11 a hour nobody would buy the food due to the cost. They would simply buy the food from somewhere else. [clown] (Also stop seizing the means of production honk honk)[/clown] That aside having a effective force that actively searches for illegals would be rather expensive.
Although the benefits of immigrants may seem like they only work for the rich they indirectly affect the poor as well.
Aside from the part where these farms are clearly not fit for a capitalist system where they have to pay market rates for their labour instead of getting some indentured servants that they can always report to the authorities if they try to ask for a real bed, this is still incorrect. The price of food has not changed dramatically in for example the UK after they allowed the Polish to come and work on the farms thanks to the EU. The only difference is that the workers now live in shit condition and speak with a truly massive amount of z's, y's and s's. The difference has gone to the people owning the farms, not the consumer. And this is a structural problem with any lowered wage costs for industries that people have to buy to survive, so that is healthcare, food, housing costs, electricity, and so on.
More profits for the rich? I don't think that helps the majority of people
Alright now to more of the meat
but this increase in price is also noticeable and may be causing people to put off and delay making families.
Not a bad thing. Overpopulation is bad.
I can dedicate an entire post to overpopulation, but I'll single out some specifics just for this topic
1. Overpopulation is a problem in a large part because large amounts of people are immigrating to small spaces. Notably in Europe recently
2. We should then remove immigrants to take the stress off our systems, especially since most of them get much more kids than natives
3. Overpopulation is mostly a problem in India, China, and Africa specifically because they keep having kids when they shouldn't
4. The solution to overpopulation is not to cram everyone into the western world
Aside from that, wages decline for natives as mentioned in that same study. This is a strong negative even if the immigrants are self-sustaining.
The only positive that is actually true is when they start a business. Most of them don't do that however, just as most natives don't start businesses.
Offset by the fact that the prices of everything go down. Your dollar is worth more due to the hard working immigrant in America who helps farmers keep their farms and the bottom line low.
Even if you could stop every immigrant (and you can't) you'd kill the economy. With demand remaining the same, labor costs going up and production going down you'd create a domino effect.
Your own study said otherwise. There was no noticeable effect on the produced goods price specifically because of free trade, the goods are being sold at the international scene thanks to technology such as refrigeration and fast transport. Production doesn't happen locally anymore for most things and transport costs are minimal. The only prices they do effect locally are the housing and rent prices, and prices for services that don't require large amounts of skill such as landscaping.
If you stop every immigrant, you piss off the rich because they can't hire one to act as their footrest anymore, but you bring about an era of positive economic growth thanks to the people already there not having to spend a large amount of money on their housing situation, freeing up that money for the economy.
The great wall protected China from being invaded by the mongols. Hadrians wall kept Saxons from invading the Romans. The berlin wall kept capitalism away from communism.
As mentioned, the wall doesn't really do shit for keeping them out of the US. They fly into the country or otherwise arrive legally and then overstay their visa
It makes it harder to sneak back in
after they've already been caught once and aren't able to get a new visa though. Assuming the border is actually guarded
The main thing for the wall is the cartels. Even just a small fence in limited locations has had a strong positive impact on stopping cartel crime from passing into the US, a full border wall will force the cartels to either redirect their entire supply chain through more easily stopped and searched vehicles like boats, or stop trying.
Either way, it helps, just not at the thing people want it for.
As far as welfare goes... I'm pretty sure you need a social security card to get welfare. My parents are in their Seventies and they have a hard enough time. I don't know how welfare works in your country. Its a topic that's widely debated (despite bad debunked research by the CIS)
I'm not 100% on your welfare, but I do know that if they have kids in the US, those kids become US citizens, and are therefore entitled to welfare
Which includes whatever is needed to keep them out of poverty, which in turn gets spend on the entire family because you can't have one member of the household out of poverty, and the rest dirt poor.
There's also welfare fraud of them taking a dead person's social security number, or the number of someone living somewhere else. It seems your welfare system is like your political system. Ancient and inefficient, with a sprinkling of mismanagement
CosmicScientist wrote:
I'm not digging through XSI's giant quote because jeeesus but I did notice they mentioned something along the lines of taking care of the elderly is why immigration exists today. Overpopulation is bad but the current common consensus meme you find in the Labour/Corbyn/Bernie fanatic UK subleddit is that European countries (UK, Germany, perhaps France and others) have immigration to pay for the elderly/aging population/top heavy population.
I mentioned it in passing as an example of a terrible argument that shouldn't exist and is defeated by the data saying that immigration potentially reduces native population growth, as well as multiple other points
Bringing in more people to pay for the elderly is literally a pyramid scheme and anyone suggesting it should be looked at as if they just shat their pants in public while screaming obscenities
But in summary, the only bad things that happen if you remove immigrants is that the rich get slightly less rich.
Everyone else profits
And the wall is a symbol more than a working tool
(Also >Implying the wall will do anything whenever an illegal immigrant-friendly president takes over eventually and executive orders them to not arrest people climbing the thing. Give it maybe 4-8 years depending on how much Trump fucks up)
