I know my family from Italy was aided by and worked for organized criminals. I’m not aware of anything really dramatic or exciting, just what you’d expect of poor immigrants with no English and no other options for support. There are transcripts of JFK interviewing my great-grandmother’s cousin about his crimes within his labor union.
So without some support, immigrants themselves are not necessarily a great help. But it’s an investment: their children and grandchildren are the real benefits.
Of course, I would be in favor of providing support and do not expect all immigrants to procreate.
Your family’s story is similar to mine, and my great aunt had a terror of rats, because rats chewed holes in their walls to take their food, and they were hungry. But they did save up money to bring over other relatives.
I think a lot of those immigrants did have substantial support, even if it wasn’t “eat every day” levels of support.
But not necessarily the kind or level of support that immigration authorities could reasonably take as security that the immigrant wouldn’t require assistance (or wind up starving or dying of preventable disease for lack of it.)
I know at least one case in which the family got together and put all their resources into passage for a teenage girl (which is very interesting in itself, since they chose her over male possibilities despite the patriarchal structure of the society.) She arrived with very little if any money, very little understanding of English, and all her family (now dead broke) on the other side of the ocean: with instructions to somehow manage to make enough money to get the next person across.
They chose the right person (if they hadn’t, I would never have heard the story). She did it: she survived, she found work, and then she rewarded trust and sent money back for the next. The two of them got more people across; and so on. But modern immigration, or any immigration requiring financial security and/or a specific job waiting, would never have let her in.
I agree, this seems to be the root problem when you really dig into it. Oh no! People would come to America in order to work, pay taxes, and benefit from social services! How horrible! It’s only a problem if you take issue with who those people are rather than what they would do while here.
Even as a US Citizen, if I quit my job tomorrow and decided to rely on the social safety net to keep me alive, I would end up on the street. Please explain what specific programs you think an immigrant would be able to show up and mooch on?
Only if we ignore the fact that the new immigrants would be driving the economy by both producing and consuming more, and more economy = more taxes = more money for benefits.
Sounds like the US needs to start making human rights a priority.
I agree. There are nine core United Nations treaties concerning human rights. The U.S. has only signed three, and even those were the products of long, exhausting political maneuvers including reservations that make the treaties non-self executing. Meaning the ones we did sign aren’t binding - they have no force of law in this country.
This seems intuitively accurate to me. I reject the notion that adding immigrants is a de facto loss and not a net gain, unless some strong evidence suggests otherwise.
In the short run, there are costs to processing immigrants. But under 20th century style immigration, those costs are decreased by an order of magnitude. So a check mark there.
The assumption that immigrants will produce more than they consume will depend on the particular traits of the immigrants. Children will not produce much in the short run. The elderly or disabled may not produce much. Liberal welfare services could in theory reduce the incentive to work but I don’t personally think it’s so simple in practice. I think most immigrants want to work, but it can’t be denied that some percentage of the sick will come here and strain the Medicaid services. A question mark here.
Others have raised the spectre of organized crime. I think some level of organized crime is foreseeable as xenophobia among the native population forces the newcomers to band together. Production of illicit goods, and tax evasion, come to mind. Another question mark.
While there are going to be criminals in any population, I believe that the thread question plan will reduce the percentage of U.S. residents who are criminals.
If, presumably after a progressive wave election, the thread question plan is implemented, successful criminals will have no incentive to come to the U.S. You might think – they’ll come to steal from the honest immigrants. But I am skeptical of that because the wealth of the new immigrants will be low – all they needed is a discount air ticket. Compared to today’s undocumented migrants, they would be even poorer.
As I’ve posted before, I think the thread title plan would be a political and moral disaster discrediting those who are pro-immigration. There is no good alternative to continuing to seek bipartisan compromise.
When thinking about the thread question, think about tent cities with little sanitation or health care. Do not think about crime.
Let’s see: for free, they could put their kids in schools of decent quality that are also safe. If a local gang lord says he’s claiming their 15 year old daughter, they can call the cops on him. You can say that’s not what you meant by a safety net, but would they regard it as such? I think so.
Crime is not necessarily about money. Money is only a proxy for power - and power is ultimately measured in people.
Throw a couple million people in the U.S. who can’t speak English, who have little to no money, who have no job or place to live, who face racism and xenophobia and classism and all sorts of other hurdles to assimilation, and you have a situation ripe for organized crime. It will start with in-group crimes, petty thefts and minor scuffles. Then there will be protection rackets and gangs. Then as the criminal element entrenches itself, it will expand to profitable ventures such as production of illicit goods, or prostitution. All the while, tax evasion cuts into the U.S. Government’s ROI, and the crime perpetuates stereotypes, fueling the growing xenophobic backlash.
Those are both things that I am more than happy to provide them with. Since calling the cops won’t put a roof over their head and sending their kids to school only takes care of one meal a day (for the kids, the parents still need all three) then presumably these parents still have to work (and pay taxes). Seems like a net gain to me.
Also, those kids are gonna grow up to be educated Americans who can join the workforce - what else can you ask for? That’s the American dream.
To the extent we have a social safety net (we don’t really—which is one reason I find purported fears about immigrants coming to the US to “mooch” off our second rate schools, our racist police forces, and our abysmal healthcare system to be ridiculous at best) that’s already the law.
NOTE: If you entered the United States on or after Aug. 22, 1996, then you may not be eligible for SSI for the first 5 years as a lawfully admitted permanent resident, even if you have 40 credits of earnings.
ETA: I want to be very clear. The more I have learned about our immigration system, the more I have become convinced that the only way to “fix it” is to start over with a presumption that anyone who presents themselves at a port of entry and seeks admission to the US as an immigrant is entitled to admission in short order.
Well, maybe I was too certain in assuming that the new immigrants would be, like the old ones, low crime. I admit to that being a best guess based on current immigration.
I’m more confident in saying that the thread title proposal would result in an unprecedented large intercontinental movement of human population within a short time, after which the policy would be reversed in a right-wing reaction.
There currently are maybe 35 million refugees in the world. Most would try hard to get to a country as currently wealthy as the U.S. if they could. But that’s only a small proportion of the group who would try to enter quickly, before the U.S. could change its collective mind, as I believe it would.
A lot would depend on how many got in. Googling, I’m seeing that the world’s airlines carry about 4 billion people in a year. The great majority of their seats are taken, but there are a lot flown empty. So I’m thinking hundreds of millions, in a year, and maybe in just six months, is realistic. Anything approaching open borders, in the jet airliner era, is a supremely reckless experiment.
They’re here. And they can’t report crime because they’re not allowed to be here legally. Can’t you see that forbidding them to be here legally makes that problem much worse, instead of preventing it?
Truly open borders would lead to a lot of homeless people, I’d guess, before we reached an equilibrium where fewer people wanted to come. But borders open to anyone who had a sponsor who guaranteed their housing for a couple of years (or who could escrow enough cash to do so) seems feasible. I’d worry about corporations taking advantage, but that’s already happening.
