The only net positive countries in terms of fertility rate are underdeveloped. I know it sounds trendy to say that maybe the next Proust is among the thousands of Yemenites, Sudanese, Egyptian or Pakistanis coming to your country - but let's face it, he won't be there. However you'll have mad people murdering babies in kid squares and westerners will face more violence to the point where it's no longer a good idea to wonder alone as a woman after 22PM in a large France city. I have lived through the change in a few years and I'm not even 30.
Yes, they steal the jobs of the native and they lower the price of labor. These are jobs the natives don't want to do as cheaply as them, so it's economically cognent - but all strictly economically motivated society eventually dies out demographically, and that's the real underlying problem immigration isn't a solution to.
They start companies, but it's mostly ethnic food restaurants and stuff that they import from their home countries - or drugs, to a point where a parallel economy inside the hosting country exists as a parasite.
When you say that they start companies, you're thinking of very specific countries that are also running out of people, just like us. 90% lf your immigration won't come from India or China, sadly.
When you get very liberal in your immigration policy they will definitely try to hack it to their advantage but marrying inside the host country to bring the whole family - so they do self-select, but mostly for parasitism. I can think of a friend's boyfriend, a friend's mother, a friend's uncle and some ex-coworkers would take pride in gaming the benefit system while being perfectly sane and able to work - all of them are from families of recent immigrants. I wish, I truly do, that I was kidding. Sad !
The only good use would be for recruiting people in a sports team but the world isn't a great sports tournament, I'm afraid, and even if it was, you would get in trouble when too many ethnicities are mixed into the same team - see France football team, which has no arabs.
The more you import of them, the less they will be able to assimilate and cooperate with the native population, again see France. To be fair this might be the biggest issue: import less immigrants and most of these points would be less of a problem. But in doing so you'll fall under the replacement rate... Which won't fix the primary cause of all of this.
nominally agree with most of your points but the failure areas immigrants would paper over are indicators of a sick or dysfunctional society. id rather address the issues that lead to the native born population not succeeding on the metrics you outlined rather than just importing replacements.
even if we make the exception for
founders / very high skilled labor, immigration from those 2 categories would skill be wayyyyy lower than it is today. most immigration today even legal are net negative value adds
I am the child of an immigrant to the US (from Iran). I have also lived as an immigrant for extended periods of time in Mexico (13 years), Guatemala (Peace Corps: 2+ years), Argentina (on and off for 5+ years).
The arguments in favor of immigration are obvious. Low-end cheap labor, increased profits for business, lower prices for consumers. High-end skilled labor-- best brains for innovation, inventions, new startups and productivity gains.
The arguments against immigration are less obvious and are often tainted by accusations of xenophobia, racism, or nimbyism. Low-end-- working class wage suppression due to lack of pricing power, net negative post-tax, post-benefits contributions + destroys high-trust homogenous society + incompatible cultural norms + undocumented ghettoes undermines assimilation to wider culture and socio-economic mobility for progeny. High-end-- net negative pricing power for highest-paying technical jobs and related wage suppression, likewise for startup valuations, i.e. more offer by foreign-born founders, more pricing power for investors.
What I never see discussed is the the second-order effects of high and low-end immigration and their costs:
1. Entry level manual labor jobs-- I grew up earning money from mowing lawns and babysitting. Yardwork taught me entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, client relations, etc. Kids today are being deprived of the joys of manual labor outdoors due to yard crews composed of immigrant labor. What is the net negative impact on the work ethic and startup muscles on the native population of unchecked low-skilled immigration. I think this is a huge issue and also plays into the obesity epidemic-- removing physical work from the activities of adolescents and young adults contributes to them overeating and undermoving.
2. Startup Founders-- The current 90%+ tech founder/startup/vc failure rate should be considered in the light of the high incidence of foreign-born founder success. The paradigm is truly broken when only the most desperate and scrappy folks can make a startup work. It's not a justification for more high-skilled labor visas. It's yet another argument that founder/startup/community/capital formation has the potential for a step-function update of the sort that YC created.
3. Politics Abroad-- From my experience living in Latam for 15+ years, it's the most ambitious, nonconformist, and hardworking folks who try to make a new life in the U.S.-- great for the U.S., terrible for their home countries. The remittance they send home doesn't begin to compensate the countries from the skimming of these people from the local population. By removing the most independent-minded and active citizens, what's left are the corrupt, the passive, and the power-hungry. The result is the socialist kleptocracies that we see throughout Latam, from Mexico to Brazil, with few exceptions like El Salvador. Open borders is the cause of much of the instability and socialism in Latam-- the entrepreneurial, free market, hardworking folks leave and those that remain become dependent on a public sector that takes over more and more of the national economy until it approaches 100% of GDP as in places like Venezuela and Cuba.
4. Domestic Politics-- We risk importing the same problems of socialism if we continue to rely on unchecked immigration for productivity gains. Low-skilled immigrant labor sucks up a lot of public benefits and have demographic momentum-- this creates demand for more public services and arguments for a larger state to attend to the needs of the larger dependent class. The Florida experiment will be instructive-- restrict employment of illegal immigrants, wages should rise, until full employment by documented labor, ie.. supply and demand. If applied to ag sector-- prices will rise to accommodate higher wages, organic strawberries get more expensive, ag sector sells less, fewer profts, wealthy consumers pay more, unfazed.
Flooding the country with cheap labor and HIB visas is a failure mode because it undermines the work ethic, ambition, health, and well-being of the native population, as well as creating second order effects that destroy the character of the country.
The solution is smarter policy that doesn't subordinate native population to profits of the capital allocator class, whether they be VCs or big Ag.
Your article seems to intertwine legal and illegal immigration. The overwhelming majority of those coming illegally are not highly qualified and do become a drain on the government resources, most notably the health care sector which an aging population depends heavily.
I often refer to employment in the US as to having two categories, protected, and unprotected. The protected are those professions where regulations prevent someone from entering that field unless they possess certain qualifications. Doctors are a great example but there many others. Unprotected permit anyone and while they may require bit of skill there are no underlying regulations that would prevent anyone from working in that field.
An American working in an unprotected job faces immediate competition from a recent illegal migrant. I met a Nicaraguan in Mexico who recently moved to the US under a special parole program. He called me a few weeks ago and commented that in Florida the wages were terrible because even though he had a work permit he was competing with illegals who were willing to work for lower wages. This explains why many middle income Americans are afraid of these immigrants. They find themselves in professions where the competition from migrants lowers their wages.
Protected workers on the other hand do not face these problems but if the regulations were lifted, they too would find their wages dropping precipitously. Doctors provide an excellent example - imagine if a hospital could hire a foreign doctor who had entered the US illegally.
The only net positive countries in terms of fertility rate are underdeveloped. I know it sounds trendy to say that maybe the next Proust is among the thousands of Yemenites, Sudanese, Egyptian or Pakistanis coming to your country - but let's face it, he won't be there. However you'll have mad people murdering babies in kid squares and westerners will face more violence to the point where it's no longer a good idea to wonder alone as a woman after 22PM in a large France city. I have lived through the change in a few years and I'm not even 30.
Yes, they steal the jobs of the native and they lower the price of labor. These are jobs the natives don't want to do as cheaply as them, so it's economically cognent - but all strictly economically motivated society eventually dies out demographically, and that's the real underlying problem immigration isn't a solution to.
They start companies, but it's mostly ethnic food restaurants and stuff that they import from their home countries - or drugs, to a point where a parallel economy inside the hosting country exists as a parasite.
When you say that they start companies, you're thinking of very specific countries that are also running out of people, just like us. 90% lf your immigration won't come from India or China, sadly.
When you get very liberal in your immigration policy they will definitely try to hack it to their advantage but marrying inside the host country to bring the whole family - so they do self-select, but mostly for parasitism. I can think of a friend's boyfriend, a friend's mother, a friend's uncle and some ex-coworkers would take pride in gaming the benefit system while being perfectly sane and able to work - all of them are from families of recent immigrants. I wish, I truly do, that I was kidding. Sad !
The only good use would be for recruiting people in a sports team but the world isn't a great sports tournament, I'm afraid, and even if it was, you would get in trouble when too many ethnicities are mixed into the same team - see France football team, which has no arabs.
The more you import of them, the less they will be able to assimilate and cooperate with the native population, again see France. To be fair this might be the biggest issue: import less immigrants and most of these points would be less of a problem. But in doing so you'll fall under the replacement rate... Which won't fix the primary cause of all of this.
Palladium has a good piece on this issue : https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/05/18/industrial-civilization-needs-a-biological-future/
nominally agree with most of your points but the failure areas immigrants would paper over are indicators of a sick or dysfunctional society. id rather address the issues that lead to the native born population not succeeding on the metrics you outlined rather than just importing replacements.
even if we make the exception for
founders / very high skilled labor, immigration from those 2 categories would skill be wayyyyy lower than it is today. most immigration today even legal are net negative value adds
I am the child of an immigrant to the US (from Iran). I have also lived as an immigrant for extended periods of time in Mexico (13 years), Guatemala (Peace Corps: 2+ years), Argentina (on and off for 5+ years).
The arguments in favor of immigration are obvious. Low-end cheap labor, increased profits for business, lower prices for consumers. High-end skilled labor-- best brains for innovation, inventions, new startups and productivity gains.
The arguments against immigration are less obvious and are often tainted by accusations of xenophobia, racism, or nimbyism. Low-end-- working class wage suppression due to lack of pricing power, net negative post-tax, post-benefits contributions + destroys high-trust homogenous society + incompatible cultural norms + undocumented ghettoes undermines assimilation to wider culture and socio-economic mobility for progeny. High-end-- net negative pricing power for highest-paying technical jobs and related wage suppression, likewise for startup valuations, i.e. more offer by foreign-born founders, more pricing power for investors.
What I never see discussed is the the second-order effects of high and low-end immigration and their costs:
1. Entry level manual labor jobs-- I grew up earning money from mowing lawns and babysitting. Yardwork taught me entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, client relations, etc. Kids today are being deprived of the joys of manual labor outdoors due to yard crews composed of immigrant labor. What is the net negative impact on the work ethic and startup muscles on the native population of unchecked low-skilled immigration. I think this is a huge issue and also plays into the obesity epidemic-- removing physical work from the activities of adolescents and young adults contributes to them overeating and undermoving.
2. Startup Founders-- The current 90%+ tech founder/startup/vc failure rate should be considered in the light of the high incidence of foreign-born founder success. The paradigm is truly broken when only the most desperate and scrappy folks can make a startup work. It's not a justification for more high-skilled labor visas. It's yet another argument that founder/startup/community/capital formation has the potential for a step-function update of the sort that YC created.
3. Politics Abroad-- From my experience living in Latam for 15+ years, it's the most ambitious, nonconformist, and hardworking folks who try to make a new life in the U.S.-- great for the U.S., terrible for their home countries. The remittance they send home doesn't begin to compensate the countries from the skimming of these people from the local population. By removing the most independent-minded and active citizens, what's left are the corrupt, the passive, and the power-hungry. The result is the socialist kleptocracies that we see throughout Latam, from Mexico to Brazil, with few exceptions like El Salvador. Open borders is the cause of much of the instability and socialism in Latam-- the entrepreneurial, free market, hardworking folks leave and those that remain become dependent on a public sector that takes over more and more of the national economy until it approaches 100% of GDP as in places like Venezuela and Cuba.
4. Domestic Politics-- We risk importing the same problems of socialism if we continue to rely on unchecked immigration for productivity gains. Low-skilled immigrant labor sucks up a lot of public benefits and have demographic momentum-- this creates demand for more public services and arguments for a larger state to attend to the needs of the larger dependent class. The Florida experiment will be instructive-- restrict employment of illegal immigrants, wages should rise, until full employment by documented labor, ie.. supply and demand. If applied to ag sector-- prices will rise to accommodate higher wages, organic strawberries get more expensive, ag sector sells less, fewer profts, wealthy consumers pay more, unfazed.
Flooding the country with cheap labor and HIB visas is a failure mode because it undermines the work ethic, ambition, health, and well-being of the native population, as well as creating second order effects that destroy the character of the country.
The solution is smarter policy that doesn't subordinate native population to profits of the capital allocator class, whether they be VCs or big Ag.
Related: wrote about the expat/digital nomad culture in the context of Balaji's TNS here: https://open.substack.com/pub/timparsa/p/the-expat-state?r=4gw8s&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Your article seems to intertwine legal and illegal immigration. The overwhelming majority of those coming illegally are not highly qualified and do become a drain on the government resources, most notably the health care sector which an aging population depends heavily.
I often refer to employment in the US as to having two categories, protected, and unprotected. The protected are those professions where regulations prevent someone from entering that field unless they possess certain qualifications. Doctors are a great example but there many others. Unprotected permit anyone and while they may require bit of skill there are no underlying regulations that would prevent anyone from working in that field.
An American working in an unprotected job faces immediate competition from a recent illegal migrant. I met a Nicaraguan in Mexico who recently moved to the US under a special parole program. He called me a few weeks ago and commented that in Florida the wages were terrible because even though he had a work permit he was competing with illegals who were willing to work for lower wages. This explains why many middle income Americans are afraid of these immigrants. They find themselves in professions where the competition from migrants lowers their wages.
Protected workers on the other hand do not face these problems but if the regulations were lifted, they too would find their wages dropping precipitously. Doctors provide an excellent example - imagine if a hospital could hire a foreign doctor who had entered the US illegally.