There’s a very sizable number of low paying, dirty, dangerous, and/or boring jobs that we can’t find enough locals to do. Think farm hands, home care aides, meat processors, etc. Unskilled immigrants do those jobs because that’s what is available to them (I.e unskilled). If they weren’t doing those jobs, we’d have to pay significantly more for the goods and services that labor depends on. Immigrant labor is disinflationary or at least prevents or ameliorates it.

They're low paying because (often illegal) immigrants from other countries either

A) are happy to put up with what is a luxurious salary for back home, but barely liveable locally

Or B) don't have a choice once they're in, since they practically become indentured servants

In the Netherlands, no dutchie wants to work construction for example, because immigrants from Eastern Europe often take under-the-table deals where they get paid drastically less than what a Dutchie would command, though still much higher than any job they'd get back home. The same happens everywhere.

The answer is NOT to bring the country down by mass-importing low skilled workers, but by forcing these hugely profitable companies to actually invest in the country and its citizens by paying all employees as it should.

Both Dutch natives and EU-migrants are to be paid minimum wage, however it is a common trick when hiring migrants to charge them a ridiculous amount of rent for very sub-par accommodation nearby the jobsite. For example €600/month for a bunk-bed in a room with eight others. That is a way many temp agencies earn extra from migrants.

> Both Dutch natives and EU-migrants are to be paid minimum wage

In theory, yes, but I know a decent number of my own countrymen (Serbians) that most definitely aren't legally employed in NL, but they're still working construction. It's vile, but it is what it is.

Could it be possible that this bunk bed is then made a required (verbal - nobody put it in writing, of course) condition of employment?

I don't know the contract details but these workers are picked up at the facility every day with an 8-person van and brought to the job site. Not only will it be very difficult to get a rental apartment for 2 months at less than €600/month, you also miss out on the transportation if you do.

And these jobs are usually picking strawberries out in the rural sections or working for Amazon at some industrial estate that doesn't have public transit late at night.

> The answer is NOT to bring the country down by mass-importing low skilled workers

My great grandparents came to this country as low skilled workers. I work with a second generation computer programmer whose parents came as unskilled workers. I know a guy from Guatemala who cleans houses and put his three kids through college. He just about explodes with pride when he talks about his kids.

Not everyone shares your views.

> since they practically become indentured servants

Yup. A lot the cheap fruit + veg in the EU is thanks to back-breaking work by immigrants and the farm owners breaching their human and labour rights..

Who do you think is picking the fruit in the massive green house of southern spain? Not well-paid Spaniards I'll tell you - https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalcampaigns/agricultura...

anecdotally, as an Italian i worked summer jobs in the rural side few years ago being paid 4$ an hour off the table, and it was considered a very good pay. I hear all the time of illegal migrants being paid 2/3 $ an hour without any contract

I’m always deeply uncomfortable with this argument. It sounds like justification for a “slave” class to do undesirable jobs with no legal protections and sub minimum wage, just so Americans can save a few bucks at the supermarket. But at what moral cost? We can’t have it both ways—if they’re here working, then it needs to be at full American wage with full American regulation/oversight. But that itself defeats the purpose of hiring undocumented workers.

Why is it uncomfortable? It is the reality, and no one important wants to change it.

There are plenty of immigrants working under the table. And there are plenty of employers willing to hire them.

We do have it both ways.

Part of what perpetuates this sort of thing is a general idea in society that one can’t do or learn something because that’s not possible for them. I’m of the opinion that if sufficiently motivated and with sufficient constraints removed, anyone can learn and do anything. The only difference between an engineer and someone breaking their back for work is that the engineer was probably coddled from birth into being told they can do anything including engineering. Not as a pipe dream but a clear path: take these classes, apply to this college, take this internship, take this job.

Meanwhile the laborer was probably told all their life they don’t have what it takes, either explicitly or not, and that thinking held them back their entire life. Why try hard in school if I am “not smart”? Why try and go to college if I can’t pay for it? Why not just do what my neighbor or my uncle does that I know is possible? Many people need to be reminded that everything is possible if they aren’t dissuaded by unhelpful ideas or people.

<< I’m of the opinion that if sufficiently motivated and with sufficient constraints removed, anyone can learn and do anything.

Anyone can do anything if they believe enough..

It is a nice sentiment and I cling to it myself more often than not, because there is something soothing about it. The unfortunate reality, however, is that being forced onto thing for which I have no predisposition, is, uhh, counterproductive at best.

In short, I disagree with pre-supposition that your position requires ( we are all amorphous blobs that can be molded into whatever with sufficient amount of force ). And that is before we get to the question of whether it is even worthwhile to teach a kid with down syndrome calculus? Not possible. Worthwhile.

<< Many people need to be reminded that everything is possible if they aren’t dissuaded by unhelpful ideas or people.

No. People need to understand themselves. They need to experience their limits and then cater to their strengths and weaknesses accordingly. It is unhelpful to think that billions people on this planet are interchangeable cogs. We are not.

I am extremely unlikely to ever be like Georgi Gerganov. I simply do not believe I have the brain capacity needed.

It is fine to aspire, but I am not changing the world tomorrow.

If you believe that anyone can do anything, you have never done something properly difficult and watched yourself and / or others fail despite trying hard.

Inappropriate dissuasion surely exists, but you don't help your case by making such claims.

>It sounds like justification for a “slave” class to do undesirable jobs

It's the exact opposite. The slavery is being trapped in Cuba which the person decided to leave by their own free will to make it to America, where working a terrible factory job is going to make them ten times richer than they would have been otherwise.

Is you being uncomfortable with this idea actually more important than giving that person a shot to work himself to a normal American life within two decades and certainly for their kids?

>we can’t find enough locals to do

BECAUSE THE WAGES ARE DEFLATED DUE TO ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION. How is this so hard to understand?

You're exactly the sort of person who also maintains that burger flippers don't deserve a liveable wage and that there's no such thing as a liveable wage outside of what the market dictates. You'll turn around and scream about inflation due to "highly paid Americans" picking fruit, and demand that something must be done about such outrages. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

> You're exactly the sort of person who also maintains that burger flippers don't deserve a liveable wage

U.S. nationals and permanent residents can get EITC to supplement low wage income. Letting in more illegal aliens that will compete with them in the labor market is absolutely a policy choice - it has zilch to do with "market dictates". If you don't allow illegals into the country, the market will thereby be allowed to "dictate" higher wages.

I fully support increased wages for menial jobs, as long as they're not going to illegals

So the illegal immigration issue is not important to you for its economics affects or changes to quality of life but just due to your fear of the other. Thank you for making your priorities more clear.

> for its economics affects or changes to quality of life

The premise of the comment that you are responding to is that because of supply and demand, and because these people are desperate, it reducing the wages for those jobs and makes those bad jobs worse.

Thats horrible and less people should be doing those bad jobs, and the wages should increase! Desperate immigrants doing those jobs is just people pushing off bad things to a vulnerable population, and the world would be better off if those jobs got automated away entirely.

What? My issue is that Americans are getting screwed over to help illegals. No more illegals = higher wages for Americans.

Can you show your math on this one? How much approximately are "Natives" losing out to "Illegals"?

Your argument seems to be that a larger population leads to lower wages, which seems very reductive. Please elaborate

> Your argument seems to be that a larger population leads to lower wages

It's not just because of a larger population, it's also because illegal immigrants are often desperate, often willing to accept a much lower standard of living than locals, and therefore often willing to work for very low wages (sometimes illegally low)

Thus creating an under-class of workers who keep wages from ever going up to where they should be

... supply and demand?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand

These jobs are low-paying because they're broadly unproductive. If some of them weren't doing these jobs, the wages paid for them at the margin would increase. We are vastly better off importing more skilled immigrants to high-income countries, compared to unskilled ones.

That's an economically illiterate comment. You're confusing scarcity of labor, which determines price, with the utility that that labor generates.

This isn't the 1900s, dude.

If supply for labor goes a bit down, wages will increase a bit, and then companies will be incentivized to replace these bad jobs with automation.

Those jobs going away, and wages going up, is a good thing not a bad thing.

As few people should be doing those bad jobs as possible, and for the ones that do them, they should be paid more.

If we didn't have lower wage workers doing farm work food would be way more expensive and less diverse. I'm not sure how you judge the productivity of the worker...

How can you call literally feeding the people “broadly unproductive”? It’s low margin, but you can’t have a society supporting your margins without someone doing the bottom jobs.

Labour productivity has a specific meaning

Enlighten us, then?

And does "broadly unproductive" have a specific meaning, too?

They are skilled. Try taking the best and brightest out of Silicon Valley and put them on farms, orchards, and in construction, and see how well they do.

This elitist attitude that low-paid workers are "unskilled" workers is bullshit and needs to go.

You're absolutely right that 'skilled' is merely a relative term and ultimately a social construct. But nonetheless, the fact remains that those skills are so much more abundant and are not soaked up by existing demand (which would drive wage increases at the margin).

As a software engineer who has done plenty of home improvement, gardening, automotive repair, etc, I think the best and brightest would learn quickly.

Now, let's take the average farmer, orchard worker, construction worker, and then chuck them into a software job. They wouldn't know where to start and wouldn't get anywhere without the same educational basics that 99% of developers have gone through. That's not elitist, it's just reality.

So, there's a clear distinction to be made and it's not necessary to water down every word in the English language because we're afraid of hurting someone's feelings.

Uh-huh. Let's see all those soft keyboard jockeys be efficient at hanging drywall and working on a roof all day long with no air conditioning in Texas or Arizona. They won't. They don't have what it takes.

Not all of us "keyboard jockeys" grew up soft and sheltered in big cities. The dry heat of TX/AZ isn't that bad compared to the sweltering humidity of the southeast ;)

I'm from the bayou. I know damned good and well what I'm talking about. Roofing and construction for a living is not the same as occasionally going outside and sitting around in the heat.

I’m struck how you can’t see that both situations are exactly the same. Go to a strawberry field. Would you have any idea what to do as soon as you arrived? Absolutely not. No one is born knowing how to manage a farm from instinct. You’d need to learn how the farm works too.

I think the argument isn't "engineer" vs. "farmer", but rather engineer (or doctor, interpreter, commercial farmer/farm manager, industrial project manager, any other specialization that realistically requires years of training) vs. lower-skilled labor like farmhand, non-management/unspecialized construction worker, stuff that can be taught and learned relatively quickly.

I wouldn't call "low-skilled" workers _unproductive_ per se, and personally think they're incredibly valuable, but economically, the cost/difficulty of replacing a "low-skilled" worker is relatively low: it's a lot easier to find a replacement farmhand than it is a replacement farmer that manages the farm itself.

I went strawberry picking a month ago with my 4yo and she picked it up pretty quick. She'd have much more trouble joining me in my day-to-day dev job.

Picking strawberries is different than managing a farm. Imagine your 4 year old being a shot caller at the farm and how that might go. Would you have strawberries next season to even pick? Does your 4yo know how to sell thousands of pounds of strawberries?

It means, invariably, that they work positions that do not require high education. That's it. Any other euphemism in its place would just be in service of the same meaning.

Construction in a tight real estate market is broadly unproductive?

They're not all unskilled. Well-paying construction jobs, which used to be a path to the middle class, have been gutted (in the western US at least).

if you don’t think lots of immigrants (and likely illegal immigrants) work as farm hands and at meat processor plants, you have clearly not spent much time in those industries

https://www.latimes.com/food/story/2020-05-26/meatpacking-in...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/28/business/economy/immigrat...

1.2% of the US population works on a farm. I imagine an order of magnitude less work at meat-packing plants.

Meat processors. No wonder listeria incidents, salmonella and a bunch of other food born diseases are on the rise.

I think it would be better to legitimize migrant labour for those types of jobs a la Singapore

It’s shocking to me that the argument that consistently gets trotted out as to why we should accept illegal immigration is that they perform jobs too dangerous and poorly paid for non-illegal immigrants to do. Perhaps if there wasn’t a never ending stream of people so poor and powerless to take advantage of, these industries might be forced to pay livable wages or provide better protections.

It’s insane that the supposedly progressive faction of American politics is arguing in favor of a system that amounts to a modern version of indentured servitude and systemic violation of labor rights, all for the sake of cheaper fruit and meat.

> No one is opposed to the legal immigration of skilled workers.

That is not true. If no one is opposing immigration of skilled workers then why getting a visa is a lottery?

If they opposed skilled immigration, there wouldn’t be a lottery at all, there would be 0 visas allocated.

To continue your thought: if they really opposed illegal immigration, there wouldn't be illegal migrants at all.

Unskilled labor isn't a thing. There are plenty of people who can go from zero skill to writing decent python in a weekend (literally better than I've seen on some production systems) if given the chance. The same goes for building houses or airplanes. In real life, shit just isn't that complicated if someone is willing to spend a couple hours teaching the basics.

Crowdstrike? Is that you?

I sure hope surgeons spend more than a week to become decent.

Why would we be opposed to unskilled immigrants? The majority of the people who came here from Europe in the 1700s and 1800s were laborers, factory workers, farmers, and other simple occupations. Why are we pulling up the ladder behind them? Did you want to freeze the US as it was circa 1950? Things change man. The US isn't forever, anymore than Rome was. You gotta stop trying to fight the current and pretending that by preventing "unskilled immigration" you can maintain the US in some hypothetical idealized state completely specific to your imagination.

> The majority of the people who came here from Europe in the 1700s and 1800s were laborers, factory workers, farmers, and other simple occupations. Why are we pulling up the ladder behind them?

The welfare state did not exist in that time, so the cost of absorbing immigration was confined to acculturation. Immigrants had to quickly start generating value or perish. The incentives are radically different now and the marginal cost to society of absorbing each additional immigrant is much higher.

US government spending as a percentage of GDP remained low single digits until WW1; it is roughly 35% today.

> You gotta stop trying to fight the current

You must also remember that the natural state of everything is decay, and the natural state of mankind in particular is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". The current grinds everything down to sand. It is incumbent upon everyone to fight the current in the way that affords the greatest benefit to society.

What welfare costs are you referring to? Is there actual evidence that immigrants are a drain on the country? The information that I'm seeing suggests that they are a net positive in terms of taxes.

The response of cities to Texas bussing immigrants to them is pretty stark evidence: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/us/abbott-texas-migrant-b...

If they were a net gain, cities presumably wouldn't be playing hot potato with migrants by paying for one way bus tickets to "not here".

I lived in Texas for most of my life. Immigrants quite literally fueled the economy of Texas. Most homes in North Texas shift and require foundation leveling or repair every 8-10 years; estimates for this kind of work range from cheap to very expensive and it's done the same way. The difference is immigrants doing the work vs not. There's a certain amount of migratory ag that is supported by immigrants. Harbors are full of immigrant businesses and services being provided. The massive expansion in housing has mostly been facilitated by an immigrant labor force.

I lived under George W Bush, Rick Perry, and Greg Abbott as governors. I can tell you what distinguishes Greg Abbott from the rest of them is that Greg Abbott is an absolute piece of shit. I say that with zero embellishing. When I came home from the military there was this conspiracy theory called Jade Helm rocking Texas that a scheduled military training exercise in Texas was actually an exercise in taking peoples guns. Greg Abbott knew about and authorized the exercise, but stoked fears anyway: https://www.texastribune.org/2018/05/03/hysteria-over-jade-h...

Since then Greg has also employed barbed wire in the Rio Grand so that people crossing would get stuck in it and drown: https://www.axios.com/local/san-antonio/2023/07/22/doj-abbot...

Greg quite literally pried the Houston ISD's autonomy from them despite them completing the state mandate and progressing far better than anyone thought they would in the allotted time. Why? So he could institute a voucher system so that kids can go to private, Christian schools with state money: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/03/27/real-sto...

The man is a populist of the worst type. He takes an already bad situation, dumps fuel on it, calls it a solution, and acts none the wiser when things blow up; when they do inevitably blow up, he always has a patsy to blame. This is all to say, before I'd trust the actions of Greg Abbott and shipping people to new towns you should probably ask yourself, "What political game could Greg be playing?" and that will be closer to the truth than any rationalization you can come up with.

Sure, I agree that Greg Abbott is an asshole. That doesn't necessarily make him wrong, though? I'm not looking at his actions, it's obviously political theatre. The actions that appear to be revelatory to me are the ones by Democratic-led cities that went from grandstanding of their own to immediately backpedaling when the burden of providing social services to illegal immigrants was shared with them. Greg Abbott is taking a bad situation and sharing it with his neighbors, but they were closing their eyes and saying "there is no problem, and it's good actually" until they had to deal with it themselves.

Yes, they are griping because those cities already house most of Americas immigrants: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/20/key-findi...

Conservatives play funny games in their states to appease their racist and misinformed base. I wouldn’t think too deeply about it. California for example doesn’t do that song and dance and their economy is better than texas. 5th best in the world in fact if you considered california its own state separate from the rest of the US.

And this bussing showed that Ney Work and Chicago democrats were all talk and zero substance.

My observation was just the opposite. Unlike Texas, the Democratic cities did what they could to help the immigrants.

The public sentiment in those cities regarding immigration has completely flipped from the moment the buses started arriving. They were loudly in favor of refusing to enforce immigration laws when El Paso, Texas was dealing with hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossings over decades, but the second a few thousand start showing up in buses in Chicago and New York City, they declare a state of emergency and start demanding the stop of the immigrants being transported to their cities because they have no room. And now it’s probably the single strongest issue the Republicans are going to win on in the election.

I’m not conservative, but sending illegal migrants directly to sanctuary cities might be the single most effective strategic political move in my lifetime. It flipped a decades old stalemate on its head practically overnight.

Sure, in the beginning but it also proved the Republican point that you can't handle an unrestricted amount of immigration, even in large cities which also goes in favour of immigration restrictions (and of course not total immigration blockage which is not feasible and silly).

Large cities don't have the sorts of agricultural jobs that illegal immigrants generally work. They also already have high cost of living and housing shortages. So it's not surprising that they have a limited ability to absorb illegal immigrants into their workforce.

Stepping back a moment. We also probably shouldn't be surprised that disorganized mass immigration is causing problems. That's why Democrats generally advocate comprehensive immigration reform. Its going to be easier to absorb immigration if its happening in an orderly manner.

That's a fair point, but I also think that there is nuance.

The economy of most major cities isn't based on the agricultural industry that most illegal immigrants work in.

Cities generally already have high housing costs and density. So a sudden population surge is going to be more difficult to manage.

Basically Abbott bussed immigrants to the places that are least setup to be able to absorb them. So it's not surprising that there are problems. That doesn't necessarily reflect on whether immigrants are a net gain once they have been absorbed into the economy.

It takes energy to fight entropy.

I believe that the entropic state of human civilization is brutal authoritarianism.

Fight the current, indeed.

It's quite remarkable how effectively the citizens of the United States have managed to do that over the years. To resist the sweet, seductive lies of utopians who seek power.

I hope we're able to continue.

That’s insightful and terrifying at the same time

Hobbes doesn't get the last word on the natural state of mankind. Thank God.

That was when those countries were going through their industrial revolution. Those same countries are now desindustrialising.

There’s still work these people are finding in the US. Ever been to socal? Go to an el salvador neighborhood, one of the most recent immigrant communities. Absolutely buzzing with people going to their various jobs. Are they stamping out Fords? No. Pouring cement and hanging drywall maybe, or cooking on the line. There’s still plenty of work for people who can offer their time and their two hands over a credentialed resume in the US.

> Did you want to freeze the US as it was circa 1950?

That's exactly what we're doing (in Europe and East Asia even more so than the U.S.) by opposing skilled migration. Increasing legal skilled migration is much more critical, though other concerns such as asylum rights for those fleeing from an oppressive government or a war-ravaged country also matter quite a bit.

> No one is opposed to the legal immigration of skilled workers.

Is this why I keep reading "THEY TUKK ER JERBS!!!!!!" as a knock-down argument against H1-B and other legal visas here on HN?

We don't want to become Canada.

Are IT-sector workers even that low-paid in Canada anyway?

No idea, but housing and jobs in many sectors are getting extremely scarce in Canada's cities due to their insane immigration policies aiming to bring in """skilled workers"""

The government is also bringing in tons of unskilled workers and "students" who are curiously not enrolled anywhere and it absolutely shows.

Compared to the US, yeah they’re quite low compared to CoL

Apparently they are pooping on the beaches there.

As an immigrant who works in tech, I think the H1-B issue in particular is a bit more nuanced. I think the feeling is that H1-B's are used inappropriately as a tool to leverage salaries lower. I don't actually know the stats on that.

That being said, you do want immigrants working right? That's kinda the entire point.

> No one is opposed to the legal immigration of skilled workers

I can assure you that’s not true, but we hear the most about illegal unskilled immigration because everyone agrees on that.

lowering cost of labor expands our economy, agglomeration effects, etc.

> No one is opposed to the legal immigration of skilled workers.

Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist in 2016, argued that the quantity of Asian CEOs in Silicon Valley undermined "civic society" https://web.archive.org/web/20161117164322/https://www.theve....

There absolutely are a lot of people who want to restrict legal immigration. If you deny that, you're just pretending that you're not helping them out.

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” ― Stephen Jay Gould

If you believe that quote as I do then unskilled laborers can have intelligent children. Making to the United States is quite a test of endurance, flexability and competance so people who pass that filter are quite likely to be intelligent

How many unskilled laborers do we need to accept to get one future Einstein? The ratio matters.

>Making to the United States is quite a test of endurance, flexability and competance so people who pass that filter are quite likely to be intelligent

I doubt this is true in cases where you can literally just walk across the border.

I doubt you have many Mexican locals living next the the border literally walk across the border and then travel to the interior of the country. Most of them are from far away places and endure quite a challenging journey to get here. I live in San Jose in a neighborhood with many older Vietnamese boat people. Columbians have been moving in. There isn't an easy way to get from Columbia to Mexico by walking.

Crossing the Darién Gap: Migrants Risk Death on the Journey to the U.S.

https://www.cfr.org/article/crossing-darien-gap-migrants-ris...

Yes, the trek is hard for many. But physically hard doesn't imply cognitively hard or selective for cognitive traits. These paths are well trodden and the difficulty is purely physical.

I don’t think anyone knows what factors lead to the next einstein or else we’d have nothing but einsteins coming out of the public school system.

But what about the many skilled laborers who are just as willing to immigrate to the U.S. and other high-income countries? Don't they have at least just as much of a right to try and make it there legally?

We'll take the proven geniuses, not roll the dice that someone generations down the line might not be a wage-deflating leech.

Once someone gave me a similar argument in a rather rude utilitarian way: Look at all the white kids in our society. They get all the support they need. Any Einstein in there, we will catch. Adding support want change the outcome much. But look at the immigrant's children. There's so much hidden potential. Adding support has the chance to change the outcome dramatically.

I still have to come to terms with this way of thinking but in a world of limited resources it gave something to think about.

Economists say every immigrant is a net economic positive to the nation. They eat,buy food clothing, cars. Every immigrant child is a net negative to the state,at least until they turn 18. But it isn't even. Net neg per kid of maybe 800 a year, positive of each adult of 1200-1600 are the numbers I've heard on freakonomics podcast. Their guests proposed solution was to have the feds pay the states per an immigrant child to offset who bears the costs. I don't think it's even a debatable position that each immigrant is a net economic positive, in the long term. Some political groups worrying about losing their culture is a completely different kettle of fish.

https://www.bushcenter.org/catalyst/north-american-century/b...

> Economists say every immigrant is a net economic positive to the nation

This isn’t true in general and depends on the local economy and the immigrants country of origin. MENA migrants are a net loss for Germany, for example.

Even if economists agree, the money these immigrants spend lands in the pockets of rich capitalists.

The entire topic is far more nuanced than you make it out to be.

Do you have some sources for your claim that MENA migrants are a net loss for Germany?

Yes. Here[1]

[1]: https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/demografie-...

>Some political groups worrying about losing their culture is a completely different kettle of fish.

Yeah lets just turn America into Mexico, no big deal. What's the worst that can happen? Let's make the national average IQ 87 and turn ourselves into a shithole so we can have people to do menial jobs for slave wages.

> https://www.bushcenter.org

Is this some propaganda website by Bush to promote neocon values?

> Economists say every immigrant is a net economic positive to the nation.

This can only be true if they sustain themselves on their own work. An immigrant that does not work and only lives on subsidies can hardly be called a net positive.

This is not behavior exclusive to immigrants though. Either way the welfare state is not very strong in the US. There are 75,000 homeless people in LA county for example.

There's an enormous welfare state in the US through what is essentially jobs programs.

Health insurance companies, for example, are a negative drain on society, yet they employ hundreds of thousands of workers, in what can only be explained as a make-work program for pointless bureaucracy.

Lots of this in the DOD as well. And the homeless program administrators, which you mentioned.

It's just not explicit welfare to the poorest of the poor and there are a few implicit steps, because otherwise it looks bad.

When people think “welfare state” I don’t think they are imagining jobs in civil service…

This net economic benefit of immigrants varies based on their background and skill sets. In Denmark for example, MENA immigrants are a net drain throughout their entire productive work lives.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240111003833/https://www.econo...

Only because Denmark does a bad job of integrating immigrants.

In countries like the US that are good at integrating immigrants, they are a huge net positive.

False: https://inquisitivebird.substack.com/p/the-effects-of-immigr...

> Economists say every immigrant is a net economic positive to the nation

Does that not fail your smell test?

EVERY immigrant?

Many are arguing the case for the net economic value of immigrant labor which I agree is a fairly compelling case. I'd like to offer an alternate avenue of attack, however: population trends.

Without immigration, U.S. population growth would be well below replacement rate. This is a growing problem throughout the entire developed world with no fair answers -- increasingly, it looks as though the next several decades of geopolitical power will be defined by which countries can attract the immigrants necessary to maintain, at minimum, some population growth.

I won't pretend that the U.S. is a race utopia. We hit just about every single branch on the way down, if I'm being honest... but most of the ethnostates currently competing for world-power status haven't even realized there's a tree that they need to be descending yet. We have a powerful edge in the coming geopolitical era as one of the most pluralistic, multicultural nations in human history. We have unmatched institutions and experience when it comes to integrating immigrants -- not to mention the incredible advantage of having a language & culture that is familiar to the majority of living humans.

In my opinion, walking back from these advantages at such a critical turning point is probably not something that the country could survive in the long-term. We either embrace our identity as the world's melting pot or we wither away as hermits.

>Without immigration, U.S. population growth would be well below replacement rate. This is a growing problem throughout the entire developed world with no fair answers

We are leaving on a death culture, we arent reproducing maybe for economic conditions as in most developed countries wages have compressed in real terms and people prefer to have less if none kids than to lower their lifestile below what they were born into, maybe is the anti-family culture that permeates society, seiing the nuclear family as a burden to personal fullment, woman independence, career obstacle, problem for the enviroment or the miriad of other factors.

Importing migrants is just a band aid that moves the problems of our unhealthy society few years down the line, we need to focus on our dying societies.

And how would you say that these two solutions are incompatible? How does delaying the replacement rate issue with immigration prevent solving the core problem, or are you just advocating for accelerationism?

I am opposed to legal immigration of skilled workers. My reason is because it causes what Peter Turchin called elite overproduction. We have too many highly credentialed people who fight over who gets entrance to our top schools and who monopolize the highest ranked high schools. Immigrants have more social and income mobility than natives. I would argue that the professional class has become increasingly isolated and contemptuous of non-elite citizens as they continue to grow in size and monopolize elite positions. For example, our top schools seem to mostly be the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves. Those schools feed into the most elite business and government positions giving those people disproportionate power.

The reasons for inviting them I think are a combination of disingenuous or outdated. The arguments about economic survival or humanitarian reasons just don't seem true to me anymore but that's a separate point.