by _bin_ | 2025-04-15 20:40:43+00:00
No, there's not. George Borjas' "We Wanted Workers" is a pretty good summary of why. He analyzed the annual benefits of immigration to America in 2015 and found it came to about $2.1T. However, 98% of that went straight to those same immigrants. The remaining $50B, 2% or so, wasn't really surplus. He estimated a net transfer from workers ($516B loss) to the capitalist class ($566B).

There is a reason Sanders, when asked about open borders, called it a "Koch Brothers policy". If you are an average person, mass immigration is a really shitty policy, doubly so when we no longer need the same level of new people to run factories. High-skill immigration where people eagerly assimilate is a neutral or good thing; a huge number of mostly single young men is not. I consider the latter point particularly relevant, as increasing the number of men versus women is a socially disastrous policy from everything I know of history.

How will unskilled immigrants create a boon for our economy? How will that help our population when housing prices are already so high and so many are out of work? How will it help our culture, objectively or subjectively? This isn't an attempt to ask for demanding answers to questions so I can "gotcha" later, I'm legit curious, particularly on the culture point, how you think it would help.

I used "third-worlder" as code for 1. uneducated, 2. poor, 3. usually a single man, and 4. culturally dissimilar. Being an American is not defined by a piece of paper. We all know what it is and what it looks like. Our virtue is that, unlike a european nation, that's not constrained by ethnicity. A somali can never really be a briton, but he can be an American. However, that doesn't mean we are without defining attributes; we replaced the old-style combination of ethnicity and culture with just culture. As such, we must cling all the harder to that culture and those shared values, precisely because it's what lets us admit white, black, brown, red, and yellow without diluting or destroying what makes America herself.

You say "we're not hurting for space". I say I resent the idea that we should tear up more of our beautiful country for more people, or pack in ever closer like sardines in a can.

I actually really respect you linking cato; that's a pretty solid summary you linked. I think perhaps I miscommunicated my position somehow. I am not opposed to immigration. Given that our population will end up declining otherwise, I think at the very least, it's fine to admit enough people to maintain it. I do not think that importing tons of any one group at a time is good; that breeds ethnic ghettoes which tend to produce poverty and slow assimilation. I do not think that importing tons of young, single men is good; that's a legitimate social risk. I think the "who will pick the strawberries" argument has slowed investments we should have made in automation and robotics over the past decades and we desperately need to catch up on that, as over a sufficiently long time, the rest of the world will "catch up". We already see this with cost of chinese labor rising, even cost of Mexican relative to other latin american countries. We can not simply find the next cheapest country forever.

I do not support deporting legal immigrants over support for Palestine. That act would make more sense if we were discussing an actual enemy nation, e.g. china, but obviously it's much easier for Trump to beat up on the little guy who's barely a state than actually stand up to a credible threat. There is a reason I didn't vote for Trump and don't consider myself a supporter; my hope is we can bring a bit more common sense to non-maga republicans' and democrats' visions of immigration to remove his base of support.