There are threads about the US, so don’t discuss that here, but what do you think about other countries?
Background: When I was younger I traveled a lot, and had heard of famous Americans who had moved to each of the countries. I assumed that when I felt like moving to a country for a long enough period that I would need a job, that it was just a question of registering or something and I could stay as a landed immigrant.
And I did this in a couple of African counties without problem.
But when I mentioned I might move to Europe, my neighbors were stunned. Didn’t I know about quotas and waiting lists and flat out restrictions? They had longed to move out of their turbulent African nations but felt trapped. They could only move to more turbulent nations, or poor nations with no jobs like theirs.
Travel tends to weaken rah rah jingoism, and I’ve reached an opinion that (ignoring the US for this thread, please) all countries would be better off if all borders were open to immigrants. With reasonable restrictions of course for criminals, etc.
This of course was the de facto arrangement for most of history. And now in times of trouble, when swarms of people will cross a border undocumented when their county is at war or wrecked by floods, and the receiving country will eventually absorb most of them.
Well, as soon as a nation has an economy of some sort, with individual citizens able to accumulate wealth through production (as opposed to the kleptocratic looting of taxes and/or foreign aid), laws will be passed to protect that economy and that wealth, with a major concern being letting foreigners in to work and possibly start businesses of their own with the wealth produced being sent back to the visitor’s home country. Jingoism has fairly little to do with it.
I’d like to see open borders, too, but I have to decide whether I’d want a huge number of immigrants coming from someplace worse (which, being Canadian, means about 95% of the world[sup]*[/sup]) overwhelming the social contract I’ve become accustomed to. Fewer restrictions on immigration might be workable, allowing economies to gradually expand to absorb and assimilate immigrants at a comfortable pace.
[sup]*[/sup] Okay, maybe there’s a little jingoism involved…
Dunnow, a lot of the buildwork done by Medieval Spanish kings was intended to bring in immigrants. Get in immigrants (skilled and unskilled), get them to populate the open country (less space between villages = less banditry); those with technical skills may choose apprentices “from their own people” when they’re available, but very soon they’re taking locals, speaking like the locals, etc.
In Spain we have a lot of “irregulars”; we’re seeing a lot of changes in the distribution of immigrants (now we have “secondary migration”, when people who started by moving to Barcelona or Madrid figure out they’ll be better off in “the provinces”); we’re seeing many immigrants from Latin America who came intending to “do the Spains” (the original sentence was “do the Americas”, it means go to the named place, make money and go back home) ´but who get pissed with their “layz ass” relatives back home and decide to try for nationality instead; we’re getting Eastern European immigrants who came wanting to stay but who go back home after a couple years (I know two cases personally who had managed to save enough to start a business back home, although that hadn’t been their initial intent). Our governments and “public powers”, at all levels, are trying to deal with this issue and with its changes.
The current model includes quotas for many countries; one of the aspects that’s getting a lot of work done is the possibility for immigrants to get a job while still in their home country (many potential employers complained that the Ministry of Labor would tell them “you can get Spaniards to do that” - but no, not in their location!); another is trying to convince the Africans that streets here are not paved with gold and that prostitution is Bad For You (the Latin Americans alreadz know both).
I think education and information are our best bets - we have never been able to keep out those who wanted to come here, be they Cartaginians, Greeks, Romans, Franks, Italians, Moors or Russians. Geography doesn’t allow it. But of course that’s a lot easier when you’re working with people from places that have schools and TVs (Latin America) than with those who come in a shallow boat, pregnant with a baby made by a number of the men whose price included sex…
(sorry, I’m on a borrowed German keyboard and the y and z are switched. Yes, I know how to change it, but I don’t want to tweak mz coworker’s computer)
The problem with “open borders” is that they destroy the very nature of nationhood. How can a nation be defined if they cannot enforce their own borders? Open borders have the potential to create vacuums that suck people towards successful countries until the success is gone, and then there is an exodus to the next country until all countries are equally ravaged. Controlled immigration can mitigate those effects and better absorb the potential for damage.
I would contend the best part of open borders is destroying the very notion of nationhood. But that’s for another GD. Could you provide some evidence that immigrants somehow eat up the resources of a productive country, like a plague of locusts before moving on, rather than creating wealth, as they’d done in the U.S. for the last 200 years? I don’t see many immigrants raping the land here and then moving on to Canada to pillage some more, but I haven’t visited the entire country so I couldn’t say for certain.
Personally, I think “nation” is an evil. On smaller terms it’s easier to see. It’s called nepotism, cronyism, boosterism, favoritism, racism, sexism, agism . . .
For a productive economy, you want open borders and you want more population. More population means bigger market, downward pressure on wages, downward pressure on price and higher tax revenue. The only reason to close a border is either jingonistic ignorance, or the country has awesome social services which would deplete such services for its citizenry. I’m all for open borders, but I can understand it if a country wants to protect its social services, however, if the immigrant can provide a useful skill, he should have a much easier time to come in and work.
I just wanted to post a gentle reminder that I hadn’t received my Christmas present from you yet. I understand that it must take a lot of effort to send out a gift to every one of the six billion people on the planet, so I’ve been patiently waiting. Because I know a good-hearted person like yourself would never show favoritism by singling out some people to get presents and not giving anything to others. Regretably, I won’t be sending you a gift because, as in past years, I decided once again to limit my gift giving to family and friends.
The point, in the unlikely event my post is too subtle, is that nations like individuals always show favoritism. There’s not enough wealth in the world to give everybody everything - so some people are going to end up with less than others. And if you have to pick who to give something to, it makes sense to prefer giving to the ones who are familiar to you and who, in a global sense, were more likely to have been the ones who helped create the wealth that’s now being distributed.
But everyone helps in some way in creating the wealth. No one person or family or company or nation does it alone. How does the water get in their taps and the food on their tables?
I would like to see a world without boundaries. In the United States the middle class is extremely wealthy compared to most of the rest of the world. We are rich and most of us don’t realize it.
Countries other than the US DO restrict immigration. The Mexican government is extremely strict on suppressing illegal immigration across THEIR southern borders, they just don’t like it when we do it.
For most of human history, once a society moved past the primitive tribal stage, it divided into social classes. There was always, at the least, a ruling class and a working class. Societies devised various means for maintaining this class structure. (See Marx for the details.)
Within the past two centuries this strict division of classes has crumbled. All industrialized societies believe to some degree in social mobility.
The result of this belief is dissatisfaction among those on the bottom. Nobody, not even those born into the working class, wants to be working class. There is particular unwillingness to do the most unlpeasant manual labor jobs. Hence, we eventually see industrialized countries with many jobs that need doing, and few people willing to do them.
Immigration is the most obvious solution, and hence the most common one. Immigrants who come from poorer countries have a different perspective. Jobs that look unacceptably shitty to natives of a wealthy country may look quite reasonable to immigrants from a poor country.
Of course these immigrants do bring problems, but experience suggests that the problems can be handled. The United States, for instance, has fully integrated the waves of immigrants who arrived to do our dirty work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and there’s every reason to believe that current immigrants will integrate over the coming decades.
Nationalism has been a historical problem, but the existence of states is all but necessary, and aside from the concept of a “nation” unrestricted immigration across the board could theoretically undermine the concept of sovereign states, too, in fact that has indeed happened in the past. Americans more or less took over Texas by moving more Americans into the area than there were Mexicans and then “seceding” from Mexico.
I actually don’t think unrestricted immigration would harm the status of nations, the United States already has dozens of nations within it, they tend to form their own subcultures at first and then slowly meld with the rest of the country (see the histories of Irish, German, and Italian immigrants in the United States.) But nations which seek intentionally to maintain themselves in a larger state can usually do so without much difficulty as long as the state is not oppressive and the nation in question is willing to accept the governmental sovereignty of the state.
This is a popular canard that I’ve never seen any evidence to support. What jobs do Mexicans do that Americans are unwilling to do? Working as seasonal agricultural workers is something that many Americans would be willing to do if they were paid a legal wage, Mexicans do these jobs not because Americans are unwilling to do them but because many of the employers in question are operating illegally.
A lot of illegal immigrants in fact are doing jobs that many Americans actually do, believe it or not. I’ve seen people who hire groups of illegals to paint their homes, remodel a deck and et cetera. There are tons of American citizens who do contracting work, but they are a lot more expensive than the Mexicans because private independent contractors have to take out money from their income to pay payroll taxes, income taxes and et cetera. The illegals work under the table and thus can avoid paying the taxes the American contractor has to pay meaning they can work for much lower prices.
Other examples are things like seasonal work which, again, many many Americans who are of the lower economic classes have done in the past. There’s a lot of under the table jobs out there that more than just Mexicans do.
This policy was adopted by Fox at Bush’s request. The US finds it more cost effective to repatriate Central Americans from southern México than from the US. Bush of course was promising Fox an immigration agreement. Guess who didn’t live up to their part of the deal?