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My brother, who dropped out of school, lays carpet. He is very mad about immigrants "takin' our jerbs". He is also not a very good employee and miserably failed when he tried to start his own business...he wanted to be the boss without doing any work himeself... I imagine most people have made poor life choices and just need someone to blame.
Immigration in my area is heavily used for wage suppression.
I live in Canada. While it is not the fault of individual immigrants, even the Government of Canada and big banks have admitted that abuse of the International Student and TFW programs has put a lot of strain of public infrastructure and housing supply and has suppressed wages. These issues have absolutely objectively affected the average Canadian.
Every now and then you get someone on social media try to be smart and smugly say something like, "International Students can't afford to buy a house. Explain to me how they're driving up the cost of housing." But they fail to realise it increases demand for rentals, and people buy single family homes to rent the rooms to those students, and so the demand for those rentals drives up the cost of houses.
You can acknowledge that not all immigration is good without blaming individual immigrants themselves. I'm always shocked when people who understand infinite growth is a fallacy when it comes to the corporate world, don't understand that trying to grow the population into infinity year after year is just the government equivalent of that fallacy.
Yeah this is so accurate or hurts that people don't get it, or go the opposite way and blame the migrant.
I was teaching in a college from 2021-2024 and by the time I left my classes were at least 95% international students. The greed of our higher education institutions has caused a massive problem.
It's a lack of nuance. Higher rates of population growth can be good, if pressure points like housing are planned for with zoning and permitting systems that promote densification in popular locations. The badness is neither the additional people nor the housing regulations individually, but instead is that they don't match.
Also, there's a lot of racism in the mix. The people with legitimate concerns about growth planning (or the lack thereof) end up mixed in with the people who are horrified at the idea of their racial group becoming a minority of the country's population.
No reasonable person has an issue with legal immigration, though plenty of unreasonable ones do. As far as illegal immigration goes, even Bernie Sanders said that a country without borders is not a country and that open borders is a Koch bothers idea.
He also advocates for comprehensive immigration reform, probably because it wasn't cool closing the door you and your ancestors used to get in.
It would also be like, legit the best if the US stopped fucking around with other nations, at the least the ones in latin America where most undocumented immigrants come from.... likely because of the lack of stable governments over the last century has made those places difficult to live in.
Agreed, the U.S. has looked the other way as people came in illegally or overstayed their visas to be exploited for cheap labor while also starting regime change wars to plunder the resources from countries many illegal immigrants are fleeing as a direct result. All of this is for the benefit of the billionaire cabal, who relish in the fact that average citizens blame the people fleeing war-torn nations in search of a better life just as they themselves would be doing.
A nation without borders isn’t a nation, but border enforcement and deportation address the symptoms and not the root cause. Actually, we’d be way better off deporting all the billionaires.
They're wrongfully attributing to the immigrants what should be attributed to corporations, businesses and the extremely wealthy who are exploiting and trafficking immigrants.
And the wealthy help conservatives get elected, and conservatives demonize immigrants, and on and on it goes with half the country being mad at the wrong people.
there are several immigrants that made things worst: melania, THIEL, musk, cruz, . just not the ones that came with no money.
Illegal immigration increased unemployment among black men, and it created an underground economy that hired only illegal immigrants through 3rd parties. The underground illegal employers only spoke Spanish and didn't hire Americans. Some blacks supported Trump because his efforts increased employment among them.
Easy.
There is a huge portion of the country, about 1/3, that knows they aren't living the American dream, but they work hard and don't understand why.
Then, someone tells them something slightly true. That there's not enough pie to go around (semi-true), and that the reason there's not enough pie is all the immigrants and freeloaders who aren't working and are taking handouts (false).
What they aren't told is there could be enough pie to go around, if the top 1% was willing to share. They aren't. And they now control ~35% of wealth in the USA.
And then the top 1% uses that extra capital to tell that 1/3 of people that their Hispanic neighbor is the problem.
This is how it plays out locally: I live in a low cost of living town in Northeast PA. Our area has historically not been very diverse. Over the past 20 years they've ben building a lot of huge warehouses and distribution centers in our area to take advantage of the low cast of living. The industrial parks in the area all competed with each other to land these "job-creating" warehouses, and they competed by offering tax-free deals for x number of years.
So they build these warehouses, and when they hire, everybody apart from the 4 managers are hired part time, and can only work up to max of 28-30 hrs per week, to prevent the company from owing them any kind of health care retirement. Mostly, the only people desperate enough to move here for those jobs are immigrants, and since there's no attachment to one warehouse or another, as soon as there's slightly better offer, they move right on out. Our schools are getting hammered because their tax revenue hasn't increased, but instead of of 1-2 new students per year in a grade level, they're dealing with 5-6 new kids per WEEK, and a good number them come in with little to no English. Frequently, the families have to separate to get here, and that just makes everything even harder.
Now, if you're not paying too close attention, you look at the area compared to 20 years ago, and think,
The "nice" thing is if you own a warehouse, you don't even need to spend any money "convincing" people to blame immigrants, you just make a bunch of money, pay them as little as possible, and watch the nightly news talk about all the danger and crime in the area.
Many people, when they look out at the world, all they want to see is themselves reflected back at them. When they see something else, they feel afraid.
Rich people said poor people have no health care because poorer people get sick sometimes.
Y'all - look, downvote all you want, but the main problem with no-borders immigration is that it does allow those willing and wanting to do harm to other people and the country to do whatever they want. And there's fucking enough of those already with the white supremacists.
Overland migration into the US is also very much not limited to people from countries in the Western Hemisphere. I have been told 3 separate times by people in West Africa and Turkey (guy was Syrian but in Turkey) that "you just fly to Mexico and you get in!" I didn't even ask - people just were excited to tell me after asking where I'm from.
Two issues that happen across Africa where borders are only for foreigners is that 1) all those JNIM/ISGS/ISIS/Al Shebab/Boko Haram guys go anywhere they want and no one stops them, and 2) human trafficking rings have no limits or friction. Most modern-day slavery exists in corridors where there's basically free movement across borders because you just get off the bus, walk 20 meters into the bush, walk across the border, and walk back to the road and get on the bust again. Half of those victims are children. Don't gotta own an island to traffic humans.
These are not related to economic issues, wages, dog whistle racism, etc. These are objective problems that are global in scope anywhere with a situation like this. There are no easy solutions. But the friction of knowing who comes and goes into the country reduces both of those.
Feel free to try and change my mind on this if you want, but having personally crossed borders on foot myself, intentionally and even on accident, y'all gotta bring some sources and logic.
It is interesting that you ask for sources and logic while relying heavily on a false equivalence. Using the specific geopolitical instability and porous borders of West Africa as a proxy for US immigration policy is a classic strawman. The administrative and security infrastructure of the US is not comparable to a region where groups like Boko Haram operate across vast, ungoverned territories, and suggesting the two situations are "objective" mirrors of one another ignores the vastly different historical and logistical realities at play. If we are going to apply actual logic to the concept of "harm to the country," we have to look at the data regarding who truly threatens American safety. Historically, the most devastating attacks on US soil were carried out by individuals who entered the country legally, such as the 9/11 hijackers. Furthermore, the most pressing threats to domestic stability in recent years have come from within, including the January 6th insurrection and the violence seen in the streets of Minneapolis. Even the most prolific human trafficking and abuse networks, such as the Epstein case, operated entirely within the legal and elite structures of the country rather than through people walking through the bush. This suggests that "knowing who comes and goes" is a superficial fix for a much deeper, often homegrown, security issue. Finally, it is logically inconsistent to discuss a migration crisis without acknowledging the role the US plays in creating the "push factors" that drive it. The instability in the nations these immigrants are fleeing is frequently a direct byproduct of American drug consumption, which fuels the cartels, and decades of US meddling in the governments of the Western Hemisphere. From the 1954 Guatemalan coup to the long history of the School of the Americas, the US has often been the primary architect of the chaos it now attempts to border itself against. If you want to talk about objective problems, you have to start with the fact that these people are at the doorstep of the very nation that destabilized their own.
First off, thanks for your reponse. We aren't going to agree on everything here, and I don't think there's any definitive "right" and "wrong" per se. I appreciate the willingness to discuss and share ideas openly.
However, I'm going to start with some pushback.
...relying heavily on a false equivalence.
Except I'm not using it as a proxy or equivilence. I'm using it as a real-life example of open borders taken to the extreme. Specifically NOT equivilent or a proxy. We call that a "case study."
Using the specific geopolitical instability and porous borders of West Africa as a proxy for US immigration policy is a classic strawman.
I think you're stretching the definition of "classic" and even strawman arguments here a bit. Because who else has ever used porous borders across Africa as an example of U.S. border control issues? I don't imagine I'm the first person ever, but it's certainly not common enough to call it "classic."
Even the most prolific human trafficking and abuse networks, such as the Epstein case...
Epstein's trafficking network is by no means the most prolific in any sense other than money backing the perpetrators. It's just the only one you know about. Millions of people are trafficked every year. Modern slavery is on the order of 50 million people. Epstein was on the scale of hundreds, some picked from large-scale trafficking networks like Russia. I would encourage you to learn more about human trafficking before talking about it in such definitive terms.
https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/findings/global-findings/
For the record, what ends up happening is massive amounts of human trafficking, a pretty much unfettered drug corridor from South America to Europe that runs along the human trafficking routes. This ends up dropping large amounts of opiates and cocaine along the route as payments when cash runs short.
But it looks like you don't want to consider a real-world example of basically open borders. OK, no problem. Let's look at the EU's Shengen-non-Shengen border mashup, because it's every bit the same level of humanitarian crisis as the US border. So let's take that link above connecting West Africa and the Balkans and head to the Balkans.
Because of the mashup of EU, Shengen zone, and neither, moving overland from Syria through Turkey to get to Serbia is the usual route. Then from there getting on a plane. Human trafficking routes, and drugs, all come along for the ride.
Historically, the most devastating attacks on US soil were carried out by individuals who entered the country legally, such as the 9/11 hijackers.
OK, so let's jump into this (briefly, this is long enough). In the US, yes, terrorism and mass casualty events are typically white supremacists. I wasn't talking about that, actually. Though even going back to the Obama administration, fentanyl routes that push the opioid crisis are precursors made in China shipped to Mexico, made into fentanyl, then smuggled into the US. So if you don't think that the opioid crisis harms the US....I'd love to hear why you think that.
In Europe, there are limited examples of undocumented migrants being part of terror attacks in mixed groups. But it’s a fair point that rarely are undocumented migrants incentivized to – and makes sense. Anyone deep enough into ideological reasons will be patient and seek legal status that allows for greater ease of movement. The evidence stands there, you're right and thanks for presenting it in a way where I had to dig through it for the US and EU.
That being said, harms to a country aren’t limited to splashy attacks meant to push ideologies. Since I’ve said I’m staying away from economic arguments, I won’t make any here, but widespread access to harmful opiates seems like a pretty solid harm to a country. Or undermining the legitimacy of government, as cartels have done. Sure, that's its own debate about liberal democracies, but it's worth thinking about at least.
Thanks for the conversation, it was very helpful.