Immigration Thread

[Micro2Macro]

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.

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.

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.

[wufwugy]

Awesome. Thanks for the question.

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.

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.



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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.