Lots of examples in Latam as well.
In the US, people value individuality. In Japan, they have this saying: If a nail sticks out, hammer it flat. NIMBYs are ostracized for being a burden on society.
No matter if the neighbors like it or not, houses regularly get bulldozed to build new high-rise apartment buildings instead. Replacing a single family home with a 20-floor skyscraper easily 50x-es number of available apartments on the market, thereby massively pushing prices down.
And those are native-speaking, ethnically Japanese locals.
The language is notoriously hard to learn and it's not like they have super high paying jobs the way the USA does
In terms of solving their population collapse, I think white Westerners aren’t really an important demographic for them to attract though, with our very foreign culture and values on top of our very different language. If Japan can bring itself to stomach the idea of bringing lots of foreigners in to prevent the country from collapsing, they ought to import people from some of their closer neighbors, with which they have more similar language and more collectivist culture.
Immigrants don’t generally earn much, let alone work legally and pay taxes. They are not paying our retirement. They require doctors and produce our “medical deserts” (the name we use in France where social security fails because of lack of practicians). They also wouldn’t fight for us if, say, Islam invaded us — in fact they are fighting full-force against us here.
Immigrants are not de-facto children. They do not love us, and no-one asks them this question on the path to immigration.
My mother is a doctor and her father was a doctor before, and both are immigrants (from Scotland to Australia) - my grandfather was already a doctor when he immigrated, my mother was only 3 or 4 at the time but she ended up doing medicine too. Our children’s paediatrician did medicine in Sri Lanka and then immigrated to Australia post-graduation; my psychiatrist likewise graduated from medicine in India. My psychologist was born in Czechia, grew up there, moved to Australia as an adult and did his psychology degrees here. My closest personal friend is a lawyer who was born in Peru, grew up in Australia - but he isn’t Peruvian, his ancestry is Argentine-Uruguayan. One of my coworkers I work closely with immigrated to Australia only 2-3 years ago, from Argentina-he already worked for our employer in Argentina, but got an intra-company transfer to here.
I don’t know any poor immigrants-I’m sure they exist, but I just don’t know any of them personally-I know lots of immigrants but they are all university-educated professionals
Of course, I am talking about Australia, you are talking about France - but France has a great many middle class or better immigrants (and their descendants) too. The big difference is France also has huge numbers of socially disadvantaged immigrants, while Australia has significantly less (proportionally speaking). But the problem then isn’t immigration, it is mismanaged immigration-who, not how many
> mismanaged immigration-who, not how many
Until I got here I was going to post to suggest that you were allowing yourself to believe that because some of the immigrants were of the successful type that there wasn’t a vast number of immigrants who are very poor and of the type GP was talking about.
But I, you and GP agree on the “mismanagement of who.”
I believe Western countries, especially the Left in Europe, UK, and US, are in a very awkward state right now because it’s obvious that we are losing the very things that make our countries attractive to these economic immigrants if we keep the de facto open borders policies (meaning most professionals can’t immigrate to the UK without years of paperwork and just the right job offer, but if someone with no marketable skills and a long criminal record and no ID shows up on a dinghy he gets free hotel for several years while they prepare to adjudicate his claim that he faces danger at home).
Anyway anyone not in utter denial knows the above is unsustainable but they also are uncomfortable knowing that the people of hundreds of completely failed countries are suffering, and in theory if we could let one of them come to France, Australia, USA, UK, he/she would be better off. But they don’t know how to reconcile “can save a few” with “can’t literally bring all poor people here without destroying our country.”
It’s also possible that they hold a fundamentally different view than you and aren’t just naive idiots.
The phrase “destroying our country” is very charged and completely unsubstantiated in your comment. It’s almost like you are falling victim to the same type of emotional reaction you accuse others of holding.
Suppose that Madeupistan is a wealthy developed country with a population of 1 million. Over the next decade, its government has decided to admit 100,000 immigrants. It is evaluating two plans for doing:
Plan A: Admit 100,000 university-educated professionals with established careers and no criminal records
Plan B: Admit 100,000 people at random from all who apply, with no restrictions on who can apply
At the end of the decade, will the people of Madeupistan be happier under plan A or plan B? Almost surely the answer is A: plan B will admit a lot more socially disadvantaged people, worsening crime rates, poverty, social cohesion, violent extremism, etc, compared to A
Now, plans A and B are “ideal types” which don’t correspond to any real world immigration policy - really they represent extremes on a continuum of immigration selectivity, with A being a super-selective immigration policy and B being super-unselective
In the real world, Australia is significantly closer to A and further away from B than France is; and, unsurprisingly, France has significantly greater immigration-related social problems than Australia has.
And the real tragedy of it, is people end up blaming immigration and immigrants in general, when many of the problems they complain about are not inherent to immigration in itself, just to the mismanagement of it by many (but not all) Western nations
The question then is, do the people who “hold a fundamentally different view” agree or disagree with this argument about mismanagement of migration flows - and if they disagree, what is their counterargument to it?
Your example completely ignores the facts of history and geography in favor of simplicity and a narrative.
Australia is a former colony, France is a former colonizer. Australia is an island, France is a small part of a much larger continent. Density is considerably higher in France than Australia.
There is a large immigration blowback happening in Australia today, even with your ideal policies.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-27/have-the-political-wi...
Australia is a "former colonizer" too – the UK transferred the colony of British New Guinea to Australia in 1902; in 1914, Australian troops conquered the colony of German New Guinea to the north; the two thereafter were ruled by Australia until it granted them independence as Papua New Guinea (PNG) in 1975.
One of the major reasons for the British declaring a protectorate over southeastern New Guinea in 1884, and annexing it in 1888, was the British colony of Queensland (now an Australian state) attempted to annex it in 1883 – London opposed that, and declared the annexation attempt unlawful, but felt the best way to respond to Australian demands for colonial expansion to the north was to make the territory a separate British protectorate/colony. In order to convince London to go ahead with the annexation, the Australian colonies had to promise to financially support British New Guinea.
Despite PNG being a former Australian colony, Australia does not give any special immigration preference to people from PNG; so if France has given such preference to people from its former colonies in the past, I think that was a choice France made, not something it was required to do.
> Australia is an island, France is a small part of a much larger continent.
It is true that being an island makes it easier for Australia to have a "hardline" immigration policy, but there are a lot of aspects of Australian immigration policy which could be copied by non-island European nations, except they decide not to – e.g. rebalancing the immigration intake to put more emphasis on skilled immigration and education visas, and less on family reunion or humanitarian/refugee flows; mandatory detention of unauthorised arrivals, including overseas processing; the UK government's controversial Rwanda asylum plan (abandoned by the new Labour government) was in part inspired by Australia's policies.
> Density is considerably higher in France than Australia.
Yes, but what has that got to do with selectivity of immigration policy? Also, population density figures for Australia are somewhat misleading, in that they include massive areas of the country which are borderline uninhabitable; if you restrict yourself to the parts of the country where the vast majority of people live, the density figures are a lot higher, although still lower than much of Europe.
> There is a large immigration blowback happening in Australia today, even with your ideal policies.
Yes, there's an ongoing debate about Australia's immigration levels, but the debate is very different in character from that found in much of Europe. Hard right parties such as Rassemblement national and Alternative für Deutschland both did very well in their respective countries recent national elections, even if RN didn't perform quite as well as many observers had expected – and "immigration blowback" was a big factor in driving that. By contrast, the hard right in Australia (such as Pauline Hanson's One Nation) is in disarray, it had much more success 20–25 years ago, the national government is centre-left and the mainstream centre-right seems to have lost its feet, at least on the national level.
And I wouldn't call Australia's policies "ideal" – very likely there are some areas of immigration policy in which Australia could do better – it is just that on the whole I think it has been more successful than those of many European nations, or that of the US.
But you don't think that admitting, say, half the populations of all the world's best-known failed countries like Somalia, Haiti, Syria, El Salvador, DRC, etc. would be bad for a Western country? A combination of lack of education, different cultural expectations, normalized crime and corruption, etc. means that the citizens from there would be bringing all of their problems with them. A randomly-selected person from those countries is a poor fit to be productive within our alien societal framework (doesn't speak the language, doesn't understand how Westerners conduct business, doesn't have cultural context in so many things). However the problem is, compared to a random person born into a Western society, such a newcomer is well-suited to get ahead by subverting the Western societal framework, such as by taking advantage of our lax approach to property crimes, or as I pointed out in this thread or another, exploiting Western guilt to land years-long rent-free hotel stays.
This has never happened, is not happening now, and has not been proposed by any current political party. Open borders is a falsehood that has never existed in our lifetimes and nobody is proposing today. If we are going to discuss the topic, let's stick with reality.
At the same time, my ancestors who immigrated from southern Italy didn't speak English, were very uneducated, weren't considered "white", didn't have the same cultural expectations, and brought all their problems with them. All of this happened during the golden age of American progress and growth (the exact era we are trying to "make again"). I find that interesting.
==such a newcomer is well-suited to get ahead by subverting the Western societal framework, such as by taking advantage of our lax approach to property crimes==
And yet, study after study shows us that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than American-born citizens [0] [1] [2] [3]. Let's move past the fake hypotheticals and discuss the known facts.
[0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31440/w314...
[1] https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2020-10/working-pa...
[2] https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/05/13/is-there-a-con...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/30/upshot/crime-...
In the UK, the governments of both parties allow anyone who comes on a boat to remain, and they put them up in hotels until their claims of asylum are adjudicated, which takes years. How is that not open borders? Anyone with access to a dinghy can show up without any ID and not only be allowed to walk free, but to get 100% taxpayer-funded housing, when a ton of their citizens can't afford proper housing.
How is that not open borders? That's a no-questions-asked policy. And while it's "temporary" (A) they're on the honor system to show up to court in several years and (B) the citizens impacted by the crime, the draining of public funds, and the downward pressure on wages don't care, even if each migrant did peacefully walk right out 4 years later upon losing an asylum case. Although there are a ton of ways to guarantee a win, such as having a child during your stay, who would be a UK citizen. The ECHR says you have to let them stay, even if they've also shown themselves to be a criminal. https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1j3zu29/depo...
In America, meanwhile, the orthodox Left viewpoint is that "no one is illegal" and that it's fascist to arrest and deport people for overstaying visas or working in the US without legal status. Does the American Left think we should have the rules saying "the border is not open," yet no enforcement? Because that's how it sounds if you're not willing to actually deport anyone. Personally, I supported DACA (and voted for Obama twice) but I think it's insane to just do what we're doing, which like the UK, is to accept "asylum seekers," releasing them into the US and asking them to promise to show up for their hearings in a few years. Of course, we don't give them hotels, but arguably the impact of a ton of homeless "asylum seekers" every year isn't pretty either. I know Trump has made some changes to the US policies above, but the Left clearly doesn't want to tighten border control, and I'm not making up some strawman here.
> immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than American-born citizens
Even if that's true (I won't be foolish enough to pretend I know better so let's assume they are) we'd be better off with 0 immigrants and 0 crimes than 10,000,000 immigrants and "slightly fewer crimes than 10,000,000 extra native-born citizens would have committed." And the second-order effects of importing as many impoverished people as we can to compete for available housing and jobs is still bad news for the least-wealthy of those already here, which can lead to more crime in that group of people.
Unselective immigration and zero enforcement policies are a major thumb in the eye of poor and working class Americans, but the issue has basically zero negative impact on the elites -- the highly-educated and wealthy people who make up most of the present-day Democratic Party. Hence it's pretty easy for them to overlook the issues. This is why they lost, even to a deeply flawed, corrupt candidate like Trump.
You answered right before asking, their asylum claim must be adjudicated. If it is denied, what happens?
== Because that's how it sounds if you're not willing to actually deport anyone.==
We do and have always deported plenty of people. Obama (1st term) and Biden both deported more people than Trump did in his first term.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/us/trump-biden-immigrants...
== we'd be better off with 0 immigrants and 0 crimes==
Thanks for saying this, it lets us know where you stand regardless of the facts shared.
I just gave an illustration of what happens. In the UK, the ECHR forces them to let the criminals stay anyway. In the US, many just don't show up for their hearings and there's nothing anybody can do about that. And even if they only stay those 4 years, having a constant 4 year revolving door backlog of supposed "asylum seekers" means there is always a ton of people here to compete for either jobs or government benefits (especially in blue states, where they would think it immoral not to include them in healthcare and other expensive welfare).
> Obama (1st term) and Biden both deported more people than Trump did
Pretty sure that's mainly because of a change to count someone turned immediately away at the border as a "deportation" rather than as nothing, as it was before. Obama didn't have lower net immigration than his predecessor, just higher deportations on paper.
> it lets us know where you stand
I don't think any benefits of unselective immigration and the outright asylum fraud outweigh the costs, no. Those costs are overwhelmingly borne by the poorest Americans (including many legal immigrants), and I prioritize their interests above that of immigrants who don't follow the rules. shrug
[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/immigrants-used-less-welfare-nativ...
No such thing as free anything. Somebody's gotta work to pay for it. Those somebodies are the children and young healthy adults who are economically active. They are the ones who will pay the taxes which in turn fund services for everyone else.
So it's impossible to create a welfare system in order to encourage families. People need to have children first so that they can be made to pay for it.
This ignores some important facts. First, lots of immigrants already pay taxes and don’t receive government benefits. Second, we already run a continuous deficit. Third, we could choose to shift existing spending priorities to more pro-family spending.
It would cost about 1/3 of our military budget to pay for universal pre-K 3/4.
https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2022/6/2/total-...
Immigrants function as imported children in this context. People wouldn't have the children that would grow into economically active adults, so the country had to import those adults from some other country whose people did have children.
> we already run a continuous deficit
Which is unsustainable.
> we could choose to shift existing spending priorities to more pro-family spending
Absolutely. Protecting and promoting families as a national policy is the right solution in my opinion.
Those people chose to come the US for the opportunity as they have throughout history, even when birth rates were high.
== Protecting and promoting families as a national policy is the right solution in my opinion==
So you agree that we don’t need to wait for more people to have kids to pay for the policy because we could just adjust our spending priorities. Glad we are on the same page.
This implies the number of economically active individuals will only ever decrease over time. Without economically active people, collapse is inevitable. Therefore, they must either promote new families or accept immigration.
Attempts to raise birth rates don't seem to be bearing fruit in any developed country. Therefore, acceptance of immigration is merely a matter of time. They have no choice.
There is no economy without people. There is no nation without natalism.
> it doesn't have to be this way
Absolutely. If the nation can maintain a proper replacement birth rate, the population will be stable. Decline and uncontrolled exponential growth are both undesirable.
The US was built by immigrants. Before our slow slide toward christofascism it was on our money. Out of many, one. The reason we work as a society is that we take strength from the many varied cultures and experiences throughout the world. The most bold, the most focused, the most daring have always come to America with a dream of making it big.
We destroy that at our own peril. Break that down far enough and we'll become a culturally inbred irrelevant backwater. If you want to become the UK, that's how you do it.
Already largely done, and will take a generation or three to rebuild, if it ever happens.
But wealth accumulation means that on the auction for housing you are competing with someone who has 1000x more resources than you.
We can’t accept every single person who would rather live in the US or UK than El Salvador or Lesotho, unless we want our country to be like those countries, and according to the people who constantly try to come here, those countries are much worse than ours. That’s what the people who disagree with you are trying to say.
None of this has anything to do with disliking immigrants themselves. I know people of many different races and national origins and I like and respect them all. But just as I don’t think France deserves to have 10,000,000 Americans show up, not learn any French, and just import American culture and customs, I also think immigrants here should be expected to assimilate. That basically worked well for hundreds of years.
Pro tip: we are a culture of mutts. We draw strength from constant change. That's why we've been successful. And it's been dragging the right wing kicking and screaming the whole time. The things your great grandfather cried outrage about are now your treasured culture that must be protected.
It would be a little comical how little perspective the right wing has, if it wasn't a bit sad.
Capital can be used to produce more capital, but you cannot produce more land, more electromagnetic spectrum, more orbitals, etc.
The housing crisis is a restriction on what activity are allowed on land, and incentive structure that prioritize hoarding of land over engaging in societal beneficial activities.
I suggest you read up Georgism, the tax ideology that had largely disappeared from political life in the west.
Domain names are a good example, because as skissane said, you could just make another DNS root. The trouble is convincing people (browsers) to use it. The problem in attempting to overturn Facebook isn't mainly the coding, either, but having a critical mass care. Those barriers don't seem like absolutes the way land is; they're just very high, high enough for those who control them to extract economic rent.
> even domain names,
With an alternative DNS root, you can have any domain name you like, except for legal constraints such as trademarks, defamation, obscenity, etc. The problem is none of the alternative roots ever took off, in part because the browser vendors didn’t want to get on-board (they saw it as a high risk low reward feature)-and alternative browsers offering that feature failed in the market. This really isn’t comparable to land, in that the scarcity isn’t imposed by the laws of nature or laws written by government, it is scarcity entailed by a (predominantly) private social arrangement where competing arrangements are permitted, but have thus far failed in the market.
> the orbitals in the sky
Orbit is huge and while it is getting more congested, I don’t think that congestion is (as yet) a significant barrier to new entrants. The primary barrier remains the launch costs. The governments of major spacefaring powers don’t see orbital slots as a revenue source, their regulation of them is purely about avoiding conflict, and the fees they charge are about recovering the cost of that regulation, not contributing to general revenue. Some equatorial states tried to claim geostationary orbit slots over their territory as part of their territory, in order to charge for access to them - but the claim failed because the major spacefaring states refused to accept it, and these states lacked the geopolitical power to compel anyone else to take this claim seriously-and, anyway, with the growth of LEO constellations, geostationary orbit arguably isn’t as economically important as it was when those claims were first asserted
It's a network effect. The same reason it's easy to build a facebook clone yet nearly impossible to get it off the ground.
Closer to land are things like mining rights, water rights, fishing rights, pollution rights - taxing them is an obvious extension of the Georgist idea of land taxation, and it would be difficult for a consistent Georgist to oppose them, at least in principle
It also has nothing to do with labor vs capital. Billionaires don't invest (much) in housing. Sometimes they do invest in commercial real estate, but never into housing. It's the middle class who buys up everything - now almost exclusively in cash - and then won't leave those houses till death, as Silent generation currently dies.
Thing is, they do it because they can. Because their disposable income is by far the biggest in the world, so their needs in everything else are more than satisified: they already overeat, have full two-car garages filled to the brim with "stuff", have enough of everything that people might want in "multiple" quantities. So what's left to spend money on, is either investments (this is their stock market is so insanely huge), or things one don't really need in more than single units - so they don't have many houses, but single BIG houses, same for cars. Which makes a picture of unaffordability, as natually if people's residual free incomes are so large, so much money is going to be pushed into these, they will indeed become very expensive as a portion of entire income, just because everything else (except healthcare) makes a so much smaller proportion. It's simply that it just means huge houses, a lot bigger than anywhere else except Australia (which is also Anglosphere!).
Want to make housing truly afforable? Make people poor, also make them die off to free up space. Japan does both with great "success".
Our parents did, maybe, but we're doing it because we have to.
Inner cities went from unlivable crime dens to highly gentrified in the span of about a few decades. The moment the crime went away, people moved back in. But most of the people who actually show up to town council meetings are the people who grew up seeing riots in LA and graffiti-covered NYC subway cars. So building any more of the now highly valuable high-density, mixed-use neighborhoods that inner cities have is a drawn out political fight with people who think making their neighborhood more valuable will ruin it.
And this situation also applied before the last major urban crime wave too. The low-density suburban neighborhoods that are also expensive now used to actually be affordable. You could build cheap housing on low-value land at the outskirts of town and sell it for a huge profit, to people who had extremely generous government loans[0]. This is what triggered the white flight[1] that started the inner city crime wave[2] that Americans now cite as why density is always bad.
Problem is, that's unsustainable, there's only so much land that can be near a valuable set of jobs. So now you have cities where both the high-density core and the suburbs are equally as unaffordable. The next rung on the latter would be to move to smaller cities, except then COVID happened, and suddenly the housing market was flooded with people moving out of San Francisco at the same time rich Chinese people were buying up houses to hide their money from the CCP, themselves in competition with hedge funds like BlackRock that want to buy up entire neighborhoods and rent them back to the people who lived there.
America's obsession with single-family home ownership is an unsustainable system, propped up by deliberate market distortions. We don't buy into it because we're so much richer than anyone else, we buy it because the system is built to make it the only option for most people.
[0] To be clear, nobody would loan you money for 30 years, on a fixed interest rate, and let you pay it back early otherwise. The amount of risk shouldered by the bank is insane, but for the fact that the US government pumps money into banks to make this kind of financing viable to offer.
[1] The peak of suburbanization happened before desegregation.
[2] Don't forget leaded gasoline! Once racial minorities were trapped in cities, we made their kids breathe shittons of lead fumes, creating fuel for the crime wave fire.
There's dirt cheap housing in some very rural places and impossibly expensive housing in several of the major population centers where most people actually live.
Ever inflating house prices are caused by high demand and ease of access of debt. It predictably leads to endless price appreciation until you fill the bubble up enough to burst it, then we simply repeat again. Same thing happened to education. It's a 'commodity' seen as priceless and the government ensured access to endless debt to purchase it. You'll never guess what happened next.
[1] - https://blog.gaijinpot.com/what-is-the-average-salary-in-jap...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
Housing in Japan is kept sensible in large part thanks to their land value tax for real estate.
When prices are high anyone who owns has incentive to prevent the supply problem from being fixed.
Unless… you have a land value tax
Their housing prices are being further depressed by the fact that they're now dying off fast enough that even Tokyo's population is starting to significantly decline. And that, in turn, is further compounded by a prevalent superstition in Japan against living in a house where somebody died, which helps to further reduce demand for many housing units that 'become available.'
Now it's rather the opposite. If you go to Japan on a Western salary (and especially after converting Western currency post ~2022), everything's dirt cheap for a foreigner, yet quite expensive for locals, which is much more akin to the economic state when visiting a developing country.
And so saying housing is cheap in Japan is kind of crass in a way. I mean yeah obviously it is, so long as you don't happen to live and work there.
No such mechanism happens in education, once you have your degree it is yours forever. There is no secondary market. If the value goes down, sure, other people will not pay as much for new degrees, but there's no direct connection between the market value and the tuition. There is no reinforcement loop.
And especially in the era of the internet the concept of college being a necessity to educate oneself is rather plainly artificial, and it's also highly debatable whether the current GPA inflated profit motivated degree treadmills that colleges have turned into is even providing a meaningful education.
A connection, yes, but not a feedback loop. A drop in the value of a degree does not lead to everyone panic-selling their degree.
What you're describing is simple ROI---as the return on the education investment declines, people reduce their investment in degrees. But falling tuition does not further reduce the ROI, as in the case of housing where there is a general expectation of appreciation, and therefore, speculation.
[1]: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_resu...