I mean, everyone else on the SDMB assures me the only possible reason to oppose unlimited immigration is bigotry, so Bernie MUST be a racist!
Tear him to shreds now, guys! It’s your duty! Treat him the way you treat Trump.
Heh. I was going to post this in the Bernie Sanders thread, although that wasn’t the tack I was going to take.
First, let me commend Sanders for doing a great interview where he answered questions rather than dodging them, and in most cases, gave a lot of thought to the answers, as well as being willing to admit the gaps in his knowledge. His honesty and straightforwardness is something that should be expected of all candidates. We’ll never have real change if we keep supporting candidates who dissemble, dodge, and outright lie because we think they are more electable or might be better at “getting things done”.
The criticism of Sanders that I have here is twofold: First, there seem to be gaps in his knowledge that he doesn’t know about. He lauds Scandinavian countries and says he studies their ways, but on health care he doesn’t want to do it their way. Is it because he thinks a British/Canadian-type model is superior to what they do, or does he just assume that UHC=single payer without thinking much further about it? And what’s with him not wanting any private insurance companies? All UHC countries in the democracies have private supplemental insurance at least, with many allowing private insurance to directly compete with the national system. Plus, some of those systems are decentralized, or the equivalent of state responsibility rather than federal. Does Sanders support a UHC system where the states decide how to do it with the federal government setting minimum standards? No, he supports Medicare-for-all. But does any other country do it that way?
The other criticism was his refusal to acknowledge tradeoffs. Ezra Klein has made his name analyzing policy options and taking a hard look at the pros and cons and possible unintended consequences of various policy options. Sanders seriously said that we can take our jobs back from China and yet Chinese workers wouldn’t be harmed by that. Ezra tried to cut in but was unsuccessful. Free trade can be positive sum. Protectionism is always, always zero sum. If we stop normal trade relations with China, China will become much, much poorer. Sanders needs to be an adult and acknowledge that.
Now, on to his immigration stance. Very interesting. He said that open borders is a “Koch idea”, and said that mass low wage immigration makes Americans poorer. That’s actually a heterodox view in mainstream liberalism today. I doubt immigration is a high priority issue among Sanders’ mostly white progressive supporters anyway, but this won’t help him with Latinos, who have mainstream Democrats making all kinds of promises to them. This is an issue where Sanders does understand and acknowledge the tradeoffs, so good for him.
Cite, please. Kindly link to those posts stating the ONLY reason to oppose immigration is racism. Surely you’ll be able to find them.
See, when Republicans do it, it’s “coded language”. So when we say, “better enforcement”, we mean “We hate Mexicans!” Whereas when Democrats say it, they just don’t mean it. Gotta appease the rubes, after all.
Yeah, of all the people to play the hypocrite card on versus Bernie, Trump is a pretty funny choice. I’m sure his other comments about Mexicans’ character had nothing to do with the level of opprobrium that Trump faces here. Just immigration.
Bernie Sanders
Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.
Ezra Klein
Really?
Bernie Sanders
Of course. That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. …
Tullsterx: This is news to me, or is certainly not in-line with current views as I understand them.
Wow, taking answers never given to questions never asked as proof of racism. Klein never asked about Sanders’ position on immigration. He brought up the subject of completely open borders to which Sanders explained that no nation does that. He then correctly stated how the wealthy would love to see that so they would have workers to exploit, and Sanders went on to say how we have a responsibility to help the poor countries help their people.
This answer shows more intelligence than all 16 Republican candidates combined.
That’s still a pretty low bar.
Yeah, that’s ignoring real world tradeoffs though. How do foreign workers get jobs? Since demand is low in their own countries due to being poor and all, they can only get rich in the short term by selling to rich countries. Which Sanders doesn’t want them to do.
Now, as for immigration, he didn’t give his complete views on immigration, but he did rule out open borders, which means that he’s for deportation of illegal immigrants and limitations on immigration. I’m just glad we’ve settled that such a view is not all that controversial, however unpopular it might be with Latino voters.
Ignoring real world tradeoffs is the basis for most of Sanders’ economic thinking.
Regards,
Shodan
True, but he gets points for clarity.
I think that’s not entirely fair to Sanders. He’s talking long term. The third world needs the help of the international community to get the education and infrastructure they need to compete in the world market. The answer isn’t helping them get rich in the short term, as if that was possible, the answer is addressing their long term systemic issues that made them poor in the first place.
That will take new ideas and frankly the US treating nations the way it treats states(as in, do as we say or lose funding). Liberal reluctance to do that is why foreign aid has been far less effective than globalization at lifting Third World peoples out of poverty.
Sure, if you want to see poor countries evolve into rich countries over generations the way we did, that’s fine. But if you want to deal with Third World poverty now, you do it through trade agreements which hurt our workers a little, help our consumers a lot, and help their workers a lot.
You seem to be assuming that the US = the international community. Where does he say that third world nations must toe the American line? I daresay that foreign aid isn’t as effective as it should be due to corruption of the recipient nations.
You can’t say " poor countries evolve into rich countries over generations the way we did" because we didn’t do it. The US had the fortune of sitting on a pretty good chunk of land and then happening to expand at the time of the industrial revolution. The US didn’t evolve from a poor country.
THe masses here were pretty poor until the rise of the American middle class. We were relatively rich of course, but the Western model of strong middle classes and broad prosperity is a fairly recent development, and it didn’t happen overnight. It started with the Industrial Revolution, but for the first 75-100 years it was powered by very low wage labor. That’s what’s happening in a lot of rising countries, and I’m sure it will happen in less than 75 years, mainly because they have the advantage of selling their products to rich countries, which causes wages to rise faster there than they did here. But if we cut off our markets from them, it’s a generations-long project, because they’ll be relying on only their own consumer base to buy what they make.
Mostly typical pre-capitalist mythology here, but with a hint of scariness.
It is disturbing how Sanders speaks so cavalierly about what we should do as a “global economy”. “Global economies” do not act. Individuals act. Legislation, which is what Sanders promotes, impedes this free action.
Immigration is a voluntary process, therefore it increases the welfare of the immigrant, and the property owner that he buys or rents from. Those are the only people who should have a say in the transaction in a moral society.
Again, even if we accept that governments should be tending to their respective economies, Sanders’ rhetoric implies he takes it a step further. He thinks the United States govt should be “lifting up” the poor around the world. The support he’s getting out there is evidence of discontent, but it’s scary to me that he has not read up on basic supply/demand economics in the entire time he has been touting this mixture of mercantilism, stale socialism (New Dealism), and American Exceptionalism. .
Sanders speaks a lot about how things should be. The global economy should work differently, voters should vote more intelligently and stay involved, etc. But I don’t think he assumes he has the solutions, he’s just making observations about what’s going wrong.
He’s still ignoring what the effects of his policies would be on the Third world. World poverty would increase, domestic prices would go up, and in return, we MIGHT see an increase in wages. A lot of that also depends on how well he controls the importation of cheap labor.
Do you actually have examples of this, (preferably among a majority of SDMB posters)? Because if you are pretending that opposition to open borders is identical to opposition to spending the excessive money to build and defend walls (that will be routinely circumvented), opposition to punishing the children of immigrants, opposition to tackling the problem of undocumented workers by focusing on deportation while ignoring or leveling small fines on the companies that provide them jobs you are simply creating a straw man argument and I can move this to The BBQ Pit for you.
After reading SDMB political threads for the past couple months, I kinda’ get the same impression that he did…
I didn’t read the part where he called Mexican immigrants mostly criminals and rapists. Because I’m pretty sure that’s was Trump said.