The over-population thread reminded me of a question I have always had about immigration.
Why is it that people on the left (and I consider myself a liberal in most things) and many others believe that immigration is a good thing? What are the reasons most governments support immigration? There seem to be two ideas at work, although I can’t be sure. On the one side there’s the practical reasoning that immigration helps the economy. On the other, there is the “social justice” reason, and it’s this reason, that I’m most interested in.
Why is it a good idea from a social justice viewpoint to allow immigration?
Obviously, not everyone can immigrate to a 1st world country. Why are some countries given priority? Isn’t this unfair to the rest of the world? Why do some people in the U.S. for example, get so bent out of shape at the thought of closing our borders, or sending back “illegal aliens”? If you are anti-immigration, you could be called racist or worse (especially in Europe). Why?
Are there not peope who think that if a 1st world country acts as an “escape valve” for population in poor countries, that this does nothing to alleviate the problems in those 3rd world countries?
Why does the U.S. greet those escaping their country’s problems with open arms instead of working to solve the problems at their source? I’m not talking about countries where persecution is taking place, just countries where life is poor and awful.
I’m hoping someone can give me the moral rationale for immigration policy, in light of the fact that you can’t accept everyone who is poor and needy.
Plus, I’d like to know why it’s virtually impossible for a European to immigrate here, but relatively easy for people from other countries (Far Eastern, South American). Why the variable treatment?
The reason it’s nearly impossible for a European to immigrate into the US is because of Ted Kennedy’s 1965 immigration law.
This law gives a preference to those would be immigrants who have a blood relative already in the US. Since immigration from Europe was closed back in the 1920s, very few Americans have close blood relatives from Europe. Mexican-Americans, however, have a country right next door where they can sponsor their relatives from. Even the children of illegal aliens in this country can sponsor their relatives from Mexico or wherever, once they reach the age of 18. This is one reason why the Hispanic population in the US went from 2% to 12% in just 30 years.
As far as politics, it seems to me that the Democrats want this to go on because of the votes from the immigrant community, since they are more likely to work for low wages, and to collect welfare. The Republicans, shortsited as they are, view this as merely a cheap labor thing. They are also afraid to speak out, IMO, lest they be called “zenophobes”. This despite the fact that most Americans want a halt to the current immigration flood.
It looks like I posted this in the wrong forum. It should have been put in “General Questions”.
I wasn’t asking about political reasons.
Also, you must be incorrect about the immigration from Europe being closed in the 1920’s. I know many immigrants who came from Europe who had no family here, and they came in the 1950’s, including my father.
Actually, the Ukrainians and Russians are immigrating at a steady rate to the United States. The reason fewer Europeans came in recent decades include.
The prosperity of Western Europe.
Eastern Europe was mostly closed off from 1945-1989.
Other nations ‘compete’ for these immigrants (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Israel, etc.)
Europe’s population is no longer growing. In fact it is shrinking, and draws immigrants itself.
…not because of the junior senator from Massachussets at that time.
I know someone from a Western European nation who could not emigrate legally to the U.S. because it was impossible for the average person to emigrate (unless he was employed to do a job no American could do). He was here illegally for many years. I know of others who have told me the same thing: it is virtually impossible to emigrate from Europe. There are quotas, at most a few hundred people from certain countries can participate in a lottery per year to come here. This is not my imagination. It’s not like the 50’s when lots of people from Europe were allowed to emigrate - I know of hundreds myself, and I’m just one person.
Currently, there are many people who come here from 3rd world countries - what is the reason for the difference in policy?
Rusalka, you’re misinformed. There is no policy which allows more third world than European immigrants, apart from the fact that those granted asylum for obvious reasons are more likely to be coming from third world countries.
There are quotas, true. But for most countries (India, China, Mexico and the Phillipines were the exceptions when I was doing immigration law a few years ago) those quotas are never met.
As for the lottery, the ONLY Westerners not eligible are Brits and Canadians, because their immigrants are considered to be overrepresented in the US (the lottery is called the “Diversity Visa” after all). For the same reason, the following countries are excluded: China, Colombia, The Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Pakistan, The Philippines, South Korea and Vietnam.
To answer the title question, immigration is a good policy because a dynamic economy requires more workers than countries are typically able to provide on their own.
That was the economic answer, what about the moral justification? In European countries such as France and Germany, people with liberal leanings get angry when their government wants to bar immigration, even though the unemployment rate is very high. The same is true of the U.S., if you are anti-immigration, you are considered evil. Why?
People always feel the need to be politically correct. That’s how I look at. “You can’t restrict it - they have just a right to come here as anyone!” Worried about being labelled a racist, or, as someone mentioned, a xenophobe. They fail to grasp (or they ignore) that the more immigrants there are, the less jobs there are. It has to be restricted sometime. T’is inevitable. People seem to lose sight of this.
Simple. It’s all about fairness in the marketplace. Free trade is impossible without freedom of movement. If we can go over there and set up shop because wages are low, what earthly reason have we for denying them the opportunity to come over here and take advantage of our high wages?
Us “politically correct” liberals dislike one rule for the rich and another for the poor.
It always tickles me when so called “conservatives” are only in favour of free trade when it means they get rich. The moment people elsewhere buy into the hype and try to take advantage of it, you’ll have to go a long way to find a bigger group of people wanting government help so that they don’t have to do any work. I’m not saying all conservatives are like that. Those who really believe in free trade are often quite keen on relaxing border controls as well.
There are a few other reasons, but that’s the really big one for me.
Are you sure you’re correctly informed ? Germany, at any rate, already has a pretty darn strict immigration policy - they recently had to introduce a green card system for skilled workers, and even so, they only issued a 5-year work visa to the applicants.
My reason for opposing anti-immigration platofrms? because it is used as an excuse for Racists, Fascists and xenophobes to create ill will towards non-whites and foreigners.
For a country like Ireland to make heavy restrictions on the number of foreigners they allow in is completely hypocritical given our history of emmigration.
In a “globalizing” world where money can cross borders in nanoseconds, it is inconsistent to prevent people from doing it.
For example, a country’s economy can crash unexpectedly because all the foreign capital is taken out (eg Argentina; the Asian Tigers). How is it acceptible for Nation A to suddenly cause Nation B to be very, very broke, and then forbid B nationals from leaving?
Immigration is also beneficial (as mentioned above) because immigrants will work for less money and benefits than nationals. For instance, who but a migrant worker would tolerate having to pay into the national social security schemes but be ineligible to recieve them? What American-born person would consent to the conditions that domestic workers submit to without complaint? Who do you see working in fast-food restaurants for minimum wage? If we stopped immigration, the economy would suffer.
To me, free trade means free movement of labor, not just goods and services. End of story. I think that, in general, the world as a whole stands to benefit more than it would lose from immigration (not denying that some people and even countries WOULD lose).
One particularly tragic story is the nursing shortage here in the U.S. Nurses from South Africa, drawn here by the high wages from our shortage, have left SA with it’s own, much more severe, shortage, with no time to train more nurses. My question is: why not import them? But no matter how far that works, somebody always ends up with less nurses.
The major problem is that the people who end up with the least of something are composed of TWO groups: the people comparatively less willing to pay, and the people comparatively less ABLE to pay.
As for one part of the OP’s question that I don’t see answered, I think the leftist=pro-immigration correlation comes out of the civil rights heritage, and the ethos of inclusiveness.
A semantic problem: Even assuming that every single immigrant is seeking a job, and that none would ever find themselves in a position to offer a job to somebody else, there would still be exactly as many jobs with immigrants as without immigrants. It is the ratio of available jobs to job-seekers that would go down.
The assumption that every single immigrant is seeking a job, and that none would ever find themselves in a position to offer a job to somebody else, is false. Even a mom-and-pop Korean mini-grocery needs someone to operate the cash register when mom and pop are out.
Plus, this assumes that the mere existence of immigrants would create no jobs. Immigrants need to buy groceries, clothing, and cars, too, and some of them (gasp!) even make investments in businesses that create jobs.
About 20 years ago, the sporadic argument about the Adirondacks came up once again in New York, and somebody made the wonderfully cynical comment, “The main difference between the pro-preservationist and the pro-developmentist is that the pro-preservationist already has his second home in the mountains.”
For me, it’s something of that sort. I have no Native American ancestry that I know of. Some of my American ancestors date back to the early 1600s – but they were immigrants none the less.
I can see arguments for restricting immigration to people willing to settle in underpopulated areas as being logical. I can see arguments for expectations that people will learn to operate within American culture (though I grew up in a small city with a number of elderly immigrants who had never learned English; their children translated when necessary, and I think very few people would have the chutzpah to criticize the smorgasbord of “American” customs and terms that originated with immigrant culture).
But any disagreement with immigration as a whole other than from a full-blooded Native American is in my mind saying that what’s been sauce for the goose is no longer sauce for the gander, on a par with the preservationist/developer comment that I began this post with.