An aspect that some of my peer group have been having in their minds - not productive because past working age and thinking about emigration - being an immigrant elsewhere - in response to the political environment. Not quite an asylum seeker.
Most of countries won’t accept them without meeting certain economic preconditions. Other threads here have explored that.
That “don’t use our resources without adding as at least as much as you take” is of course why.
Reality being that within most ranges people who come here in aggregate will contribute more than they take, by multiple measures.
I do though wonder if that strong safety net bit is part of the strong anti immigration positions in some Nordic countries?
I can understand a concern about ‘culturecide’ (for lack of a better word). I have heard it claimed that Native Americans aka American Indians throughout the 1800s and early 1900s had at least some opportunity to be assimilated into the white mainstream culture, and this argument has occasionally been used to blame them for their own near-extinction. Never mind that many who tried this route were barred from integrating, even if it were totally true it ignores the destruction of the way of life to which they had been raised and to which they were accustomed.
I would consider it to be a fair and reasonable policy to restrict the rate of immigration to the point that the number of residents born elsewhere does not outnumber those who were born here.
A home is a very common metaphor for a nation, but I think it’s a really flawed and dangerous metaphor. Your home is a place that contains only people you know and love, people that you’ve chosen personally to build a life with. It’s single-owner, and that owner gets to make all the decisions for good and ill about the home, with no balance of power. It’s a minuscule location compared to the rest of the world, and there are a lot of other homes like it. Your home doesn’t project violence (I hope!) onto the neighborhood, and it doesn’t have policies that can negatively impact folks living in nearby homes to the extent that their homes become miserable to live in.
A nation is a place that contains millions of strangers bound only by geographical proximity and subjection to a specific state power. A nation like ours is democratic, and decisions are made by a bunch of strangers who often don’t get along, and those decisions are messy and deliberately balanced to allow these fractious strangers to cohabitate. It’s enormous compared to the rest of the world, occupying a significant percentage of Earth’s landmass. It projects violence and foreign policy onto other nations in a way that sometimes makes it miserable to live in those nearby nations.
A home is not a nation, and a nation is not a home, and conflating these two ideas leads to unwise decisions.
I can understand it. I’ve just never agreed with it. I pretty much despise nativism.
Cultures are dynamic and static cultures are not only virtually impossible without extreme repression (and even then that repression would itself breed slower reactive change), but are a philosophical ill. It boils down to comfort and you don’t have a right to comfort. What if English High Teas disappear? I don’t care. What if cotillions and quinceañeras disappear? I don’t care. What if the dominant language in my neighborhood changes? I don’t care. If none of those things disappear/change, I also don’t care.
I don’t think anyone else should either. They do, slaves to ‘peer pressure from dead people’ and what makes them metaphorically feel warm and snuggly, but they shouldn’t. Sadly, IMHO, I am in a small minority about this.
My husband tried to go through proper channels. He was able to legally come into the US and work, on a theoretically infinitely renewable visa but with no path to citizenship (and at the time we could not be married in the US). It cost a significant amount of money (immigration attorneys, etc.), as well. At the first renewal, the US officials were such unbelievable dicks about it that we decided to take ourselves and our educations and work ethics and contribute to someone else’s country.
I can’t help but think that the current system not only promotes illegal immigration, but it also skews the immigrant population towards people whose primary contribution is labor. Which gets to the point: I think there is a “too much,” in that various aspects of any system (infrastructure, employment sectors) can be inundated. A functional immigration system would provide a relatively quick but limited path in without causing that overwhelm.
—But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.
—Yes, says Bloom.
—What is it? says John Wyse.
—A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.
—By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years.
So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it:
—Or also living in different places.
In recent years illegal aliens are sometimes “senior” or receive de facto preferential treatment compared with those trying to immigrate, through proper channels. Pretty wacky.
Trying to research the issue some there is, apparently, quite a bit of academic work on welfare chauvinism:
The idea is that many of the strong safety net nations are precisely concerned with that issue: they want to maintain the strong social supports of citizens and are concerned about extending the net to newer arrivals.
Unclear if the reluctance to extend the net is based exclusively on the economic contribution bit or on other cultural “otherness” … but clearly anti immigration policies are gaining in the Nordic countries.
But that still comes back to the same point: the decisions might be a messy matter for democracy instead of those more easily made by a lone homeowner playing the role of sole decision-maker — but once that happens, once permission is given or not given, and once the moral magic of consent takes place or doesn’t, haven’t those decisions been conclusively made by the nation sure as the other decisions got conclusively made by a lone homeowner?
I’m not going to get into that with you. The metaphor of “nation as home” is what I was addressing. The only thing I’ll address is that the justification for regarding a home as private property that one person should be able to exclude others from does not scale to a nation in any way.
What if, for the sake of argument, that your opinion is decidedly on the fringe, and the vast majority of the citizenry is vehemently against open borders. Now what?
What if a person lives in a democracy and holds a minority opinion? I mean, isn’t the answer to this question really obvious? They try to persuade others to adopt their opinion, or they try to change the way decisions are made if they think that “majority of citizens rule” isn’t the right way to make this decision.
I’m always bewildered when people ask a question in this form.
If the question is instead: What is likely to happen in the near future? I would say a slow drift towards lower migration. Migrants have always been a convenient scapegoat for social problems, and it’s easier than ever in the AI / social media bubble age.
Well, right. You wouldn’t try to go against the majority in a Democracy, and advocate for breaking numerous federal and state laws, etc. You wouldn’t try to push your unpopular views on everyone else?
Let’s take a vote. That’s pretty Democratic. Right?
Sure, but the metaphor attempts to link failing to follow our nation’s immigration protocols with someone breaking into your house. One is a terrifying invasion of your personal domicile, a deeply disturbing violation of your safety, and the other is a paperwork problem.
I’d rather look at it as a 6 lane superhighway with a 25mph speed limit. Would we jump up and down about how brazenly all these people are breaking the law, without a care in the world? Would we demand to Enforce The Law and hand out thousands of tickets a day until people start driving 25?
We can all agree that the speed limit should be something higher than 25, but until the lawmakers can come together to craft the legislation necessary to raise that limit, is the “right” answer to flood the highway with cops and take down those scofflaws? Maybe the right answer is to fix the terrible law first and THEN be vigilant about enforcing it.
But that’s just it: as a homeowner, it sounds like I get to weigh in unilaterally on whether someone in this house without permission is an invader and deeply disturbing — and, as a voter, don’t I likewise get to weigh in on whether someone in this country without permission is an invader and deeply disturbing? And if enough voters agree with me, and enough elected officials take their cues from us, doesn’t the latter decision wind up carrying at least as much weight as the former when consent is withheld by the nation for the nation instead of by one guy for his house?