One of the basic misunderstandings about illegal immigration is that the people who are working in the kitchen or cutting lawns are doing that because they are blocked from meeting their potential contribution. The idea that the next generation is injected with first world anabolic steroids and American influence is why they achieve so much lore than their parents is not true. I know lawyers who work the line in restaurants because that is what they are relegated to when they get here. If we allowed people to contribute more, they would.

you don't have to be a citizen to collect social security right now. You just need to work a certain amount and you get benefits just like a US American.

Regarding your second paragraph, immigration with Mexico is close to zero now. Most of these people are coming from Central America now.

Right, but they have to be lawfully in the US, which is basically the same kind of thing that I was contemplating when I talked about having a path to some legal status. The idea is that the path would be much more open than it is now, since the current system imposes pretty strict limits on how many people can achieve that status. But it still wouldn't necessarily be automatic for anyone who crosses an open border.

They tricked us into talking about socialized medicine and free college too. People are even talking about just handing out free UBI monies.

Is it shocking or not that some of the people here least worried about hordes of immigrants are me, goofyballer, champstark and markksman from CA, NY and TX - states with huge foreign born populations?

^^ Florida Man REPRESENTIN

In more News That Does Not Matter, Gina Haspel lied under oath, no actionable intel produced by her torture camp

yawn

I live in a country with triple the per capita immigration of the US and where only half the population has two parents both born here. I think you are out of your mind if you think the US could absorb 130 million people in the course of a few years.

I feel like the answer to these questions are obvious once you straighten out how you think an economy works at the most basic level, or what you actually think an economy is. When you say that adding tens of millions of people to the country would necessarily result in tent cities with zero education for children, you're implying that the average person is a net drain on the economy. And if the average person is a net drain on the economy, then how does the whole thing work in the first place? The population of the US increases every year, why does the real gdp per capita of the US also increase (almost) every year? Sure, if 140 million extra people materialized here tomorrow, we'd have problems, but like, it takes six months to build a house, what exactly are we worried about here?

The idea that you can fix unemployment by exporting unemployed people is just the inverse of the idea that immigrants will take your jerbs.

+1

I think you're out of your mind if you think 130 million would come in a few years. Migration with Mexico is close to zero. There are only 30 million people in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala as it is.

How do you reconcile the fact that immigration from Mexico completely dried up during the recession and the panic that open borders means everyone comes here? People come when they don't have jobs at home and we have demand here.

You mean that immigrants taking your jobs is false and exporting unemployed people lowers unemployment is true? And I'm not suggesting importing or exporting anyone, just freedom.

I'm thinking the economy in the gang controlled neighborhoods of San Salvador isn't really your concern here.

Showing Nunberg how to properly Nunberg

Tons of Euros itching for freedom from healthcare ldo.

I don't think it's easy as you make it out to be either. Do you deny healthcare to people who are not yet eligible? Are they also ineligible for child subsidies or any form of welfare payments while unemployed or unable to work?



No citizenship, but presumably a path to citizenship. Be allowed to move to the country, take residency, be permitted to work, children allowed to attend school.



See my questions above in response to Wookie's post. What happens to people who are not eligible for the welfare state?

Not mentioned here is that the country he is talking about has a population of 40 people.

What does your first sentence mean anyway?

I'm sure the most honest answer I can give is I'm not sure, and I don't know how large of a problem would be created, or even if there would be a major problem. I'm generally incrementalist about policy precisely out of some sense of epistemic humility, and for that reason alone I probably wouldn't favor moving from our current system to open borders all at once, although I favor pretty substantial changes to our system.

That said, I do think there are empirical reasons to suspect that the large majority of people who arrive as immigrants would be eligible for programs in a reasonable "open borders" system along the lines I proposed. For example, the unemployment rate for immigrants in the US (including the undocumented) was similar or slightly lower than for the native-born population in 2017, and they have a slightly higher labor force participation rate. Clearly the reason the macro-economists think open borders would raise GDP involves the fact that immigrants contribute to the economies of their new countries, which should place some upper bound on the scope of the problem you have in mind. It's also not surprising, people migrate looking for a better life.

It's not clear to me that a more open immigration system would dramatically change the outcomes, although maybe it's possible that too many new, relatively unskilled immigrants arriving in a short period of time would find it difficult to find work. But, I'm with microbet in being skeptical of exactly how large a wave of immigration might occur.

So, to your question, if you can make reasonable assumptions about the economics, then it seems like the answer should be that you can offer some baseline of social welfare programs to immigrants just as you do to the native-born. I think that should minimally involve healthcare and education. My point before was just that opening borders doesn't remove the possibility of making more fine-grained policy adjustments if needed. I presume even if one decided that this was the correct way to move forward on immigration policy that there would arise problems that would have to be addressed, but I'm not able to address them in the hypothetical. I suspect that economic problems would be more likely to occur for large movements of refugees than for immigrants who come seeking work in the first place.

Um, of the 4.4 billion people living in developing countries, a whole bunch of them can't afford to 'build a house' in the USA. When we say 'open borders', it means anybody who wants to come can come right? So, you are saying that all the people coming are going to live in "houses"? LOL?

Andrew Miller was just held in contempt

Libs status: pwned

Like most of US history? We've effectively had them for most of the country's existence.

Attractive, white women and their families aren't the sort of immigrants they have a problem with.

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