I think the discussion there is going beyond the slogan of “Abolish ICE” to broad brushstrokes that
The argument seems to have become that no amount of immigration, legal or illegal, is too much. (Assuming control of entry by criminals, trafficking of drugs or humans, etc.)
FWIW I strongly believe a high immigration pipeline is a net positive for this country. Especially in a time of declining birthrates.
And these characterizations of alternate takes as only possible because of bigotry or ignorance, that any amount is good and that to object to any number is ignorant or hateful, seem wrong to me.
Times ahead are unlikely to make this a debate just of the moment. Conflicting winds are at play: refugees from wars, climate change, political oppression, and just poor economies will increase; and birth rates are on track to decline even in the less highly developed nations of the world. We could go from having huge numbers clambering to get in, to being desperate to get new immigrants, in less than a generation. I certainly have no crystal ball.
But I am for deciding thoughtfully about how to proceed and then having some ability and resources to follow through on that plan.
A large enough wave of immigration that it causes the system to collapse, or allows a foreign power to literally take over demographically by sending so many people they outnumber the original inhabitants.
Thing is, those are small-country worries. Short of something like a supervolcano making South & Central America uninhabitable so pretty much the entire surviving population is forced to flee north, that’s effectively impossible to happen to the US. And it’s iffy if even that would be enough.
One factor driving anti immigration support in some countries is that increasing housing supply is a much slower process than rapid influx of immigrants needing housing, raising housing costs, especially entry level housing. Yes more immigrants provide the labor pool to construct new units, but a rapid pace is going to create a mismatch, with higher costs and poorer living conditions likely both resulting until supply catches up.
That is not collapse but it is still a significant problem.
I don’t think having totally open borders makes much sense. Yes, we need low-skill workers to do the work that current Americans will never do, but we don’t have the infrastructure (e.g. housing) to take in twenty million people if they all came at one time. It would be a nightmare. I also think that anti-immigration policies are thinly veiled bigotry against non-whites who would like to come and work. I read somewhere that white South Africans were allowed to apply for immigration to the US but black South Africans were not. If that’s not racial discrimination, I don’t know what would be.
FWIW I don’t think there is much debate that now, and historically, actual immigration policies are often bigotry, commonly not even thinly veiled.
The OP is not predicated on doubt of malicious execution of immigration policies. And that bigotry and racism has been a factor in support of various immigration restraints. That’s given.
The basis for their case at extreme paces and all age group?
It is never a concern that immigration can outstrip the ability of infrastructure and support systems to keep up? At any level? Even if one presumes that over time that corrects, there are short term issues that unavoidably result in resentment and problems that a more gradual process would avoid.
I haven’t read it in a while, so I won’t be able to articulate all the arguments or what restrictions or slow downs they would propose putting in place. I just recall that the arguments were quite compelling.
The problem with the present immigration discussion is that it is a broken system that Republicans have repeatedly prevented from getting fixed because they want to pander to the above mentioned racist sensibilities.
There should be a safe harbor and path to citizenship for anyone who comes here, follows the laws, makes money, and pays taxes.
Immigrants wouldn’t come here if there isn’t work to do, so the flow of immigration will kind of self correct. I don’t think it’s maliciously racist to have some basic caps and things like that. But I also don’t have a strong argument for them, other than it would be very unpopular not to have them, since huge swings of immigration tend to activate right wing reactionary movements, and destabilize the very governments who are trying to make a stable safe nation people want to immigrate to.
As usual, a lot of those resentments are manufactured by bad faith influencers nowadays.
A review of the book from a Hoover institution fellow is a good start to check the points the book (and the reviewer) makes:
A large part of the book is Caplan’s stating and evaluating the various economic arguments for and against open borders. The main economic argument in favor is one that Michael Clemens, an economist at the Center for Global Development, has made: namely, that when poor people move from areas where they are badly paid to richer countries like the United States, their wages multiply. A striking graph shows that the “wage multiplier” in moving from poorer countries ranges from a low of 1.5 for people coming from Mexico to a high of over 13 for people coming from Nigeria. This happens immediately and, therefore, the gain cannot be attributed to the skills they gradually gain here.
Many Americans gain, too. We gain as consumers from the new goods and services that are now somewhat less expensive. Four groups that are clear gainers are property owners (from the increased demand for housing); retirees (currently 25 percent of direct-care workers are foreign-born); working moms (from cheaper child care); and construction workers (the increased demand for housing leads to increased supply.) While few people would accuse Caplan of understating the benefits from immigration, I am one of those few. Immigrants start businesses at a rate that is twice that of native-born Americans. Among the main beneficiaries of such immigrant employees, therefore, are American workers.
Is there any amount of immigration between Alabama and New York that would be considered too much? Or California to Colorado? It’s certainly not hard to quantify individual negative effects of both types of internal migration but we’ve generally held that the negative effects are outweighed by the positive effects of unrestricted internal movement.
And we see when we allow for total, unrestricted internal migration, the effects are more mild than the biggest fear mongers predict and also there are natural reactive forces within states that control total migration in a non-source biased way (mainly via housing prices and job policies).
And yet, for the international migration cases, there’s generally little engagement with empiricism. People will confidently predict the behavior of immigrants as if they’re simplistic, hive minded folk are project dire numbers without looking at the true data on migrant behavior (including that many of them have no goal of long term settlement and there’s significant outflow migration effects that significantly balance the inflow).
There’s a real debate about migration and then there’s a fake debate about migration that is mainly there to put racial and class prejudice under a more polite cover and everyone engaged in the first debate generally agrees that we’re extremely far from the mark where migration policies could ever negatively impact the nation, if it ever could, while the second group proposes fake debates because the answer was never the point.
I don’t think the latter is a fair representation of at least the mainstream “liberal” position. It’s just a statement of the opposite of the conservative position. (I mean, “open borders” is kind of the same thing).
It seems to me that mainline positions are much more like individual case problem solving, like “look, we clearly need extra workers to come in and pick crops, we should make it legal to do so” or “If someone was brought across the border as a baby and now is 16, it would be cruel to send them back to a country they don’t even know”.
(I’m surprised/not-surprised there isn’t more of an open-border case from the libertarian right. Border controls are a big distortion on the labour market after all).
But… I think that it should be a regulated thing in order to avoid not overloading public services or capacity to handle such things. Or for that matter, to depress wages in any industries or segments of the economy.
The libertarian right is dominated by white nationalists; the libertarian right movement originated from the white nationalists as a tool to fight de-segregation. They certainly aren’t going to approve of more brown people immigrating.
I came in here to support exactly that point. Canada has had one of the most liberal immigration policies of all industrialized countries. Over recent years, we’ve admitted more Syrian refugees than the US, not only on a per-capita basis, but even in absolute numbers despite one-tenth the population.
But even here, immigration levels are being reduced, for the simple reason of resource overload. Highways are too congested, housing is becoming scarce and overly expensive. Properly vetted and well qualified immigrants are always welcome, and so are desperate refugees fleeing for their lives, but immigration has to be constrained by infrastructure limitations. The same applies to the admissibility of international applicants to a limited number of college spaces. Excessive immigration can undermine our fundamental infrastructure.