Re:Zero-sum thinking on immigration will make America poorer
by pjc50 on Monday June 29, 2020 @06:33AM
(#23676208)
Unless and until deportation is eliminiated entirely, that's an inevitable part of being an immigrant. Regardless of the skill level and social status of your job. Even if you're a CEO you can still theoretically be deported for a driving offence in a lot of places, until you get your full permanent residence. And then you have to wonder whether a future government might remove that residence.
The British government has gone backwards on this: a British-born child of non-British parents was stripped of her citizenship, barred from the country, and denied legal appeal. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c347vzp58nzt/shamima-begum...
Re:Zero-sum thinking on immigration will make America poorer
by notahacker on Monday June 29, 2020 @06:57AM
(#23676336)
Aggressive stances towards deportation are the consequence of inaccurate arguments that immigrants are on average unwelcome freeloaders and destroyers of job value rather than making the future of the country more sustainable though. It's entirely possible for immigrants to have security of tenure and actually more desirable given declining birth rates: it's the assumption that our current society would be more sustainable in their absence which drives governments to make it as difficult as possible to obtain/retain.
All the rhetoric which drove repatriation of the Windrush migrants [a much more representative case than Begum leaving the UK to join ISIS] was based around the popularisation of the idea that the UK was 'full' of 'unsustainable' numbers of migrants. So it certainly doesn't help immigrants to pointedly refuse to state reasons why this is incorrect.
Nobody said 'caste, second class or non-citizens' though. Yes, people who have the 'colonialist mentality' might assume that foreign-born people are only capable of replacing menial workers, but that's not implied by the basic logic that if people are born below the population replacement rate some countries and above it in others, some population transfer might be desirable and not consistent with much of the reality of immigration.