This is a big topic right now in both the United States and Europe, and there's not really a dedicated thread for it.
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This is a big topic right now in both the United States and Europe, and there's not really a dedicated thread for it.
closed borders and tight immigration is a terrible policy because it makes for no better way to solidify the welfare state and all the awful that comes with it.
the claim that immigration harms the domestic economy by lowering wages is total bullshit. trade (immigrant labor is trade) increases consumer surplus by a greater degree than it reduces producer surplus. it's kinda the easiest known way to increase prosperity.
immigrants outperform domestics on social mobility.
i suggest cracking down on illegal immigration, increasing legal immigration, and profiling.
Glad to see the commune is worth a fuck these days outside of like 2 threads.
3 threads if you include werewolf, chum....
...p.
Bloody anglo saxons, coming over here, from Northern Continental Europe, with their inlay jewellery, and their shit burial traditions, and their miserable epic poetry...
Ded link is dead, commie.
Can you elaborate on why this is? Some of us don't understand what is so good about immigration and the benfits pumping up the numbers.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
What are your thoughts on implementing some sort of flexible immigration policy? Example: the current job climate is very unfavorable for national citizens, and adding more people to the pile will only dilute the unemployment numbers even further, we forget about immigration and focus on strengthening things at home.
To illustrate what I'm saying, consider a situation where you have a family of 5 persons. Wife and 3 kids. All are healthy and seen as leaders among the community. Your family takes in kids off the street and provides for them, gives the food, shelter, some guidance etc. Your family is able to do this because your family is a strong unit that has all of its basic needs taken care of, is secure, healthy, and ready to open its arms.
But then one day all of your family members but yourself are involved in a serious traffic accident and require 24/7 home care. You now bear the responsibility of taking care of your family yourself (you have to feed them yourself because they are incapable at the moment) and you have to keep working to pay the bills whilst manually doing a lot of things for your family that they otherwise were capable of doing themselves prior to the accident.
Are you going to keep bringing kids in off the street and provide for them too while you struggle to even meet the basic needs of feeding your own? If you do, everyone will be worse off as everyone will only partially have their needs met and this would surely create more chaos.
Now blow that example up to a macro scale where you have a country full of people unable to take care of themselves, and the government wants to bring in more people that require 'taking care of'? Sounds like we should at least get our shit together first.
Immigration and immigration policy isn't something I understand very well though, so perhaps I am off base with immigrants = taking jobs and instead perhaps immigrants = creating more jobs. But that is the way I perceive it and would need to see some sort of evidence to suggest this isn't the case. Here in Canada a lot of offices will ask on an application if you are a visible minority, or a homosexual, or transgender etc. as they are preferred to be hired for the sake of increasing diversity in the workplace. Making things too diverse thus decreases the chances of traditional national citizens obtaining certain jobs.
I want this thread to take off. I flip flop on my thoughts daily and feel fully justified each time. But you can always take amother step back.
Awesome. Thanks for the question.
I can't fully explain this because I haven't yet covered the effects of immigration in my course material, but it is the same basic philosophy found in "gains from trade" covered in Econ 101. Here's a domestic labor market graph. It shows the producer surplus (all transactions below the demand for labor and above the equilibrium price of that labor) and the worker surplus (all transactions above the supply of labor and below the equilibrium price). w is the original price, w' is the new price after immigration. "Gains" shows what additional prosperity comes to the economy from immigration.Quote:
Originally Posted by Micro2Macro
http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/classes...mages/fi69.jpg
While domestic workers do lose when the price of labor in their market decreases, the total surplus increases. The total surplus of an economy is the sum of all its prosperity. Total surplus would only equal zero if everybody was dead. So, an increase in total surplus is an increase in an economy's wealth even if in a specific market worker surplus decreases. People aren't wrong when they say that immigration harms workers in certain sectors in the short run, but they are wrong when they extrapolate this to mean that it harms the economy. Not trading labor harms the economy. Also, the harm to specific workers is only short run. In the long run, they benefit as much as everybody else. The long run is an unspecified amount of time (because it can be any amount of time). It's good to think of the long run as being what we are right now based on all the decisions made before the current time. Ten years from now, the economy will be in a long run position based on the decisions we make now and up to that point. If we allow open trade of labor, people will be better off in the long run just like how what trade of labor that happened before this time has made us better off.
I don't know if this helps. The topic is probably covered in 102 (macroeconomics), which I haven't taken yet.
I hope the above gives an idea for why "strengthening things at home" is aided by immigration. Our producers will be more better off than the worse off that workers are, which is growth and what creates more capital to create more production and more technology and more everything. The basic principle behind why immigration helps the economy is the same as the one that has done everything positive for us in our economic lives, be they having bigger and better TVs (or having TVs at all), having more and cheaper and tastier food, or having more and better jobs creating these things.Quote:
What are your thoughts on implementing some sort of flexible immigration policy? Example: the current job climate is very unfavorable for national citizens, and adding more people to the pile will only dilute the unemployment numbers even further, we forget about immigration and focus on strengthening things at home.
I understand the sentiment. However, it isn't analogous to the trade of labor. Trading labor isn't like taking care of an extra member of the household. That's more akin to providing welfare to immigrants. Which, if we did that (we do, partly), your analogy would work perfectly.Quote:
To illustrate what I'm saying, consider a situation where you have a family of 5 persons. Wife and 3 kids. All are healthy and seen as leaders among the community. Your family takes in kids off the street and provides for them, gives the food, shelter, some guidance etc. Your family is able to do this because your family is a strong unit that has all of its basic needs taken care of, is secure, healthy, and ready to open its arms.
But then one day all of your family members but yourself are involved in a serious traffic accident and require 24/7 home care. You now bear the responsibility of taking care of your family yourself (you have to feed them yourself because they are incapable at the moment) and you have to keep working to pay the bills whilst manually doing a lot of things for your family that they otherwise were capable of doing themselves prior to the accident.
Are you going to keep bringing kids in off the street and provide for them too while you struggle to even meet the basic needs of feeding your own? If you do, everyone will be worse off as everyone will only partially have their needs met and this would surely create more chaos.
Now blow that example up to a macro scale where you have a country full of people unable to take care of themselves, and the government wants to bring in more people that require 'taking care of'? Sounds like we should at least get our shit together first.
Diversity policies are silly and usually politically motivated. They harm everybody (even those they're targeted for benefit) for the same reasons about surpluses listed above. When you pay more for something you otherwise could, the world loses. You can think of this as derived from the fact that prosperity itself on a fundamental level is doing more with the same resource than previous.Quote:
Immigration and immigration policy isn't something I understand very well though, so perhaps I am off base with immigrants = taking jobs and instead perhaps immigrants = creating more jobs. But that is the way I perceive it and would need to see some sort of evidence to suggest this isn't the case. Here in Canada a lot of offices will ask on an application if you are a visible minority, or a homosexual, or transgender etc. as they are preferred to be hired for the sake of increasing diversity in the workplace. Making things too diverse thus decreases the chances of traditional national citizens obtaining certain jobs.
Takes half of an econ class, suddenly expert on immigration
takes a stats class, doesn't remember shit
it should be noted that i dont necessarily think it's a good idea to take in refugees. it's probably better than doing nothing. even if the productive and moral "quality" of the refugees were near the bottom of the rung, it would probably still be better. the better policy is to make them not needing to leave their region in the first place by drowning isis in an ocean of western muscle.
which brings me to the idea that virtually everybody in the media is saying, that it's wrong to use extreme force and boots on the ground against isis. they say things like how isis needs to lose by slow burn and domestic forces and blah blah blah. couldn't be more wrong. it's just silly "over-learning" the problem of the iraq war. isis isn't gonna die a slow death, and no the caliphate isn't going to magically lose its religious legitimacy if it can't uphold its rapid pace. it will remain as long as we don't send in squadrons of humvees.
it should be noted that the "problem of the iraq war" was not in the invasion. that was good. saddam was worse than a cunt and the west really was treated as liberators from the beginning. the problem was the administrative effort. it was shit, probably because the american will and know-how was low. it was an afterthought to the bush admin. they effectively structured chaos (things like disbanding domestic security forces). no wonder iraq went from embracing the boots on the ground to loathing it.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...-children.html
The physical backlash is starting.Quote:
Hundreds-strong' mob of masked men rampage through Stockholm station beating up refugees
It's worth pointing out that the term "refugee" there is largely inaccurate. They were targeting people who appeared to be certain types of immigrants. There's a world of difference.
Edit: For clarification, I don't condone this type of randomly beating the shit out of people. With that having been said, everyone with half a brain has known this type of shit was coming sooner or later.
Translation of the leaflets they gave out beforehand:
Also, be careful getting too emotionally involved with the term "children" in stories like these. This description includes anyone who claims to be 18 or younger, and there have been several, several, several cases where they've proven someone who said they were <18 was really >25. It's kind of how like they keep saying these immigrants, er I mean refugees, are mostly women and children, but all reliable sources are saying they're more than 80% grown men.Quote:
Enough is enough! Sweden isn’t what it once was and no one could have missed that by now, and practically every day we have to wake up to news about new murders, robberies, rapes and other crimes.
We’ve had to suffer through innumerable cases of serious crime where the criminals never even get punished by claiming that they’re below 15 years of age. Around the country we’re getting reports that the police can’t combat this wave of crime targeting the Swedish people.
In some cases as in the murder of a woman, working at a home for unaccompanied refugee children, in Mölndal, it all goes so far the the chief police officer shows greater sympathy for the murderer then the victim. That type of respectless behavior is nowadays so deeply rooted in our spineless politicians, our weak law enforcement and our lying media that nothing surprises us anymore.
But we refuse to accept the continued rapes and harassment targeting Swedish women. We refuse to accept the destruction of our once so safe society. When our political leaders and police show greater sympathy for murderers then their victims there’s no longer any excuses to let it all happen without protest.
When Swedish streets no longer are safe to walk for swedes it’s our duty to do something about it. Today, 200 Swedish men gathered to send a clear signal to these Moroccan “street children” that’s ravaging around the central station. The police have clearly shown that they lack the means to repress this phenomenon and we now see no other alternative then handing out the punishments they deserve ourselves. The law enforcement have left walk over and the social contract are therefore broken – that’s why it’s the duty of every Swedish man to defend our public spaces against the imported criminality.
We who gathered today we’re not your politician, your journalist or your police officer. We’re on the other hand your father, your brother, your husband, your friend and your neighbor. Swedish men and women deserve safety in their everyday life and therefore we encourage everyone who also sees the problems to follow in our footsteps, both in Stockholm and in other places across the country.
For a better future together.
i could possibly endorse that sort of behavior. it has been of yet almost wholly unexplored by academia (and the media is abhorred by the concept even though it adores covering it), but there is strong reason to believe that populist violence responses to mistreatment by normally well-behaved citizens are typically extremely impactful at forcing the hand of the government to fix its shit.
My worldview doesn't really incorporate an assessment of whether it should or shouldn't happen through some kind of moral or ethical lens. Instead, I offer two observations:Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
1. This type of violence was inevitable from the combination of the increased crime, the attempts for the police/media to cover it up and the lack of effective response from the government; it's also going to increase in severity and frequency from here on out.
2. The effectiveness of this particular approach compared to following democratic channels is interesting to think about. Some people would say that those who are angry should push to vote out the people who put the policies into place that allowed this type of thing to happen in the first place. I don't think that's a very effective or reliable vehicle for change, especially if they couldn't achieve a majority.
wuf: I agree with 95%+ of your analysis in this thread, and I was impressed by all of it, including the small bits I might not agree with.
One comment I might add is that the sort of tradeoffs you describe, eg short-run costs for overall benefits in the long run or costs to certain subsets of the population for aggregate gains across a population, are often hand-waved away or swept under the rug without enough consideration. I've been reading/hearing about a lot about economists that are starting to pay more attention to these costs, especially as new research is better about quantifying them.
One somewhat relevant podcast recommendation I'd make is econtalk, where Russ Robert from Stanford hosts a bunch of interviews about lots of topics, some of which are only tangentially related to econ, but always are interesting. I've found balanced discussion of interesting tradeoffs to be a common theme as I listen.
Oh shit econtalk is from econlib. Best site for economics there is. I've stuck to just reading Sumner, Caplan, and Henderson (and not nearly as much anymore as I should).
This is true. A comprehensive view of immigration has not yet been constructed. While the open borders economists I read have many compelling reasons for their position, I don't espouse open borders anymore due to some unintended consequences. I don't know exactly where I stand, but it's basically wherever it is that anybody who wants in can come in but they get no special treatment and laws are rigorously upheld. The current situation is a mess because it subverts all those.Quote:
Originally Posted by Juked07