The debate the politicians in my state (Schleswig-Holstein, a state in Germany) had about this was really interesting, sadly it’s in German.
Essentially, it boils down to two issues:
Morally, we all are descendants of immigrants, or at least most.
Economically, most immigrants are willing to work hard. Combined with the fact that our society has a birth rate below replacement rate (1.3 vs. 2.1) we need immigrants just to keep our standard of living. And if we can give them a better life at the same time, it’s definitely great.
Another frequently-cited benefit of opened borders is that -- for the most part -- current citizens own everything in this country, and stand to make a bit of cash if there's an influx of new faces looking to buy houses, used cars, rent rooms, etc etc etc.
I can only follow that argument if we're talking about citizens that already have assets. Increased competition for houses, used cars, and rentals will drive up prices, which is good news only if you own houses, cars, and rental property respectively.
Productivity is the root of all prosperity. Read this excellent article: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/02/always_keep_you..... Workers become on average ~20x more productive when they migrate to the first world. Because we are capital rich and we have sane government and law and order. Imagine if you were moved to Haiti and you got stuck there. How much could you contribute to society in Haiti? You could maybe slice some coconuts on the side of the road - is that gonna make the world a lot richer? Roadside sliced coconuts? Nah, much better for you to be in first world even if you're doing a low skilled job here like delivering catering to a high tech startup. That catering company is able to produce food much more efficiently, and in SF or NYC you're able to distribute it much more efficiently, and you're part of this souped-up economic engine that's changing the world. That's why they make 20x or up to 40x more (in the case of the extreme poor) when they migrate to the first world. It's better for everyone! Economists estimate that moving from the status quo to fully liberalized migration (i.e. open borders) would roughly double global gdp - that's an insane silver bullet. That's everyone getting way fucking richer in one fell swoop.
And that’s exactly why the politicians in my state were the first in europe to allow all refugees and asylum seekers to live and work like any citizen. Because that productivity increase also boosts the local economy.
> Another frequently-cited benefit of opened borders is that -- for the most part -- current citizens own everything in this country
This is not true. Very many things in this country are owned by entities that are not citizens -- foreign corporations and/or foreign individuals.
> and stand to make a bit of cash if there's an influx of new faces looking to buy houses, used cars, rent rooms, etc etc etc.
Sure, some people (some of whom are citizens) own things for which local demand and prices would increase with an influx of new people. Lots of citizens don't own much, and would be competing to purchase those things, and would suffer rather than benefit from the higher prices.
The benefit here is pretty much directly in proportion to current ownership of capital (just like the benefit from greater supply, and therefore lower prices, from labor.)
Productivity is the root of all prosperity. First read this excellent article: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/02/always_keep_you..... Workers become on average ~20x more productive when they migrate to the first world. Because we are capital rich and we have sane government and law and order. Imagine if you were moved to Haiti and you got stuck there. How much could you contribute to society in Haiti? You could maybe slice some coconuts on the side of the road - is that gonna make the world a lot richer? Roadside sliced coconuts? Nah, much better for you to be in first world even if you're doing a low skilled job here like delivering catering to a high tech startup. That catering company is able to produce food much more efficiently, and in SF or NYC you're able to distribute it much more efficiently, and you're part of this souped-up economic engine that's changing the world. That's why they make 20x or up to 40x more (in the case of the extreme poor) when they migrate to the first world. It's better for everyone! Economists estimate that moving from the status quo to fully liberalized migration (i.e. open borders) would roughly double global gdp - that's an insane silver bullet. That's everyone getting way fucking richer in one fell swoop.
You make the all too common mistake of confusing aggregate output growth with everyone getting richer. That's not a valid equivalence, as the 2001-2009 economic expansion in the US showed fairly dramatically, with the bottom three quintiles doing worse over the period of expansion, the fourth quintile mostly flat, and most of the gains in the to quintile (and, within that quintile, mostly in the top few percentiles.)
Aggregate growth doesn't mean everyone gets more; we have a system in which the major holders of capital are very good at capturing output growth.
Policies favoring aggregate growth aren't good for most people without policy reform that alters the way gains from such growth end up being distributed.
Median net worth in the US, last I saw, was on the order of $45K -- since that value is > $0, its not the case that 50% of Americans have zero or a negative net worth.
You do need immigrants, but you need them to be low level workers. Which explains the amount of unskilled people working in both Germany and the US legally, while high skilled immigrants can't get their foot through the door.
Japan is doing quite well without the insane immigration policies most of Western Europe has. It boggles my mind, how people came up with the idea of slowly replacing the native population with low-skilled immigrants for economic reasons and how that is still considered a good idea (despite all the obvious problems multiculturalism has shown to bring along in Europe).
All this current immigration system leads to is more Islam and more 3rd world in Europe.
Isn't it? By definition wouldn't an increase in supply of talent for a given job decrease market wage for that talent unless it was already in a shortage (which we never really know until it's over)?
Sound logic, but it is not an automatically enforced one.
Take waste collectors, for example:
Very few people want to do it, very few people actually do it. And it is necessary. By our sound logic, their salaries should be soaring, but they're not.
On the other hand, take lawyers in the U.S. A huge number of people want to do it. A huge number of people ends up doing it (I think the number of lawyers tripled in 30 years, for a 40% increase in population), and compared to waste collection, it is not that necessary a profession. But the salaries don't follow. They have probably dropped compared to what a lawyer used to make in the 60's (I'm not sure), but those who end up doing it still make good money.
So it doesn't seem to be a law of nature that is enforced automatically.
Interestingly waste collectors (garbos in Aussie slang) are well paid and it is quite a desirable job. They are also the hardest working government employees you see as they are given a route and when they have finished they can go home. Amazing how government can work when the structure is right.
Yes! There are certain countries that deal with these matters in a way that's alien to the rest of us. It appears that Japan has an interesting way, too.
As a side note, speaking of governement.. as a teenager, one of the books that were laying around was "The American Challenge" (Le Défi Américain) by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber. It was a parallel between European countries and the U.S.A. It also addressed the Japanese and Swedish models, the technology gap (he warned that if Europe let the U.S. get ahead, there will be a time where the gap is simply too big to cross).
and they are quite efficient - I compare garbage collection here in Seattle to Adelaide and in Australia it's only one person per truck doing most of the work without leaving a cabin.
Yes this is what happens when you have well paid labor - you focus of labor efficiency.
I wish we could figure out a way of "garboing" council road crews. With them you see 5 people standing around watching the one poor apprentice do the work.
It would also decrease prices and thus raise living standards. Customers would then turn their attention to better goods and services, increasing the demand for labor. You're committing the lump of labor fallacy.
Think about it this way, if two countries were to merge, would everyone be worse off because of the increased competition on the job market? No, people would be better off due to the increased amount of trade.
Not really. Muslim immigrants are usually just socially conservative. It's their children that are radicalized in European society. It's a testament to the failure of current integration policies.
The unpleasant fact is that proper integration costs money - they need to be taught the biggest official language and English, they need to be taught a profitable trade and they need to get up to speed on the domestic culture, which requires history classes etc. The alternative is to create an underclass visibly different to the majority - that doesn't end well.
It feels unfair to pay for outsiders' education, but in the case of Germany (and other low-reproducing countries) it's the only way to make sure there's someone left to pay for tomorrow's pensions
>The unpleasant fact is that proper integration costs money //
For those selecting to immigrate why not put the onus on them to integrate too? Why should the onus be on the established population to adapt? [That's obviously not appropriate for some classes of migrant like refugees, but I'm sure that's clear.]
>The alternative is to create an underclass visibly different to the majority - that doesn't end well. //
Muslims in the UK often choose to be visibly different to set themselves apart from kafirs; they're not an underclass though. You don't have to wear a shalwar kameez and a big beard or wear a hijab to follow the Koran. [Non-abrogated verses do demand violent oppression of others though]. It's basically cultural AFAICT, predominantly British Islam appears to be about importing Middle-Eastern culture and traditions, like forced marriage, that had previously been forced out of the local culture at great length. Muslims in my city in the UK go "back home" to Pakistan or support the Indian cricket team or whatever, they're not interested in adopting the established UK culture but instead creating a different culture here. Islam is not just a religion it proscribes a legal system which by tradition Muslims are obliged to instigate where ever they are.
Cultures that demand other cultures to be subservient can't integrate in to a multicultural society, it doesn't work. In order to integrate they must change; for Islam that means it must become not-Islam, it needs to deny some of its central tenets to make it compatible with other cultures.
Thankfully most Muslims I meet seem to be not at all like the Mohammed [depicted in the Koran and Hadith] they suppose to try and emulate.
>the only way to make sure there's someone left to pay for tomorrow's pensions //
Pensions are basically a massive pyramid scheme; it's going to fail eventually. The only way it can continue is if there is no limit on availability of natural resources for the manufacture of new stuff on which Western Capitalism appears to depend.
> Pensions are basically a massive pyramid scheme; it's going to fail eventually. The only way it can continue is if there is no limit on availability of natural resources for the manufacture of new stuff on which Western Capitalism appears to depend.
Pensions don't require that. Unlimited aggregate output growth requires that (and, therefore, unlimited per capita consumption growth without proportional decreases in population requires that.)
> For those selecting to immigrate why not put the onus on them to integrate too? Why should the onus be on the established population to adapt?
What's the point of assigning blame? The established population can either close the borders completely, or help immigrants immigrate at their own expense - becuase THEY are the ones who stand to lose or gain the most. Purely as a matter of pragmatism, it's the established residents who will have to pay, as they're the only ones who can. They can also choose to close the borders completely, but I don't think there is any other alternative. To assign blame may make one feel self righteous but it is hardly a solution.
>Pensions are basically a massive pyramid scheme; it's going to fail eventually. The only way it can continue is if there is no limit on availability of natural resources for the manufacture of new stuff on which Western Capitalism appears to depend.
This is a common misconception. You should do some research on what is known as "productivity growth" and then come back for a rational discussion.
You should give at least some semblance of a reason why "productivity growth" prevents pensions from being pyramid schemes instead of implicitly dismissing the parent commenter's remark as irrational discussion.
There are a lot of lazy scare tactics that pension opponents use. The parent commenter's use of "pyramid scheme" means that he or she is trotting out some variation of the argument that current benefits for retirees are paid by current employees, that in 1940 there were 30 workers for every one retiree but it'll someday be 2:1, etc. etc.
"Productivity growth" is my admittedly lazy shorthand for "You cannot ignore the effects that improved productivity has on pensions, especially when by necessity we're talking decade-or-century long timeframes. Even historically modest productivity growth means that if a worker is supporting 1 retiree this year, then next year he can support 1.015 retirees and in 60 years the average worker can support 2.4 retirees. Without mentioning why you (the parent commenter) think that productivity won't continue to grow at at least a very low level over the next several decades, then we can't really have a good discussion about pensions being pyramid schemes."
And that's before we even touch on other topics like the retiree population shrinking as baby boomers start dying over the next 30 years, the double-standard of treating purchases of U.S. Treasury bills by current workers (for U.S. Social Security) as different than, say, a hedge fund buying them, etc.
Bottom line is that pensions are complicated and can't be treated simply as if they were just a regular investment fund or savings account, and it's a waste of time to argue with somebody who just wants to handwave away the differences.
OK, so productivity increases and in 100 years 1 worker's production can support 100 retirees. How? They create stuff using natural resources. That stuff gets sold, who is buying it now that 99/100 people are out of work? How are those 99/100 going to pay in to a pension?
Oh right of course, new areas of industry develop so now all 100 people are still employed and they're producing enough stuff for 10,000 people. But that means they have to also be consuming 100 times what they did. Where is the energy coming from, where are the resources coming from to make this stuff?
Isn't it really the case that improved productivity gets to benefit the wealthy disproportionately - suppose in 60 years a worker can produce 2.4 times more output and thus support 2.4 times more retirees. That's not how it works financially, the worker gets paid maybe enough to support 1.5 times more [through taxation] and the other output increase goes to benefit the wealthy capitalist. Regardless population has tripled in the last 60 years [Wikipedia figures].
In practice state pensions in my country [UK] are reduced year on year and recently pension ages have been increased.
It sounds like you're banking on a sudden reversal of global population growth (the best case scenario of UN statistics shows continued growth for at least a couple more decades; their "best guess" is continued growth until at least 2100).
There are fringe, exceptional cases where this is a legitimate fear, but in the general broad-brush case, it's largely a self-fulfilling fear, brought about by the way people are treated when they come to a society that believes this. If they are given no opportunities when they arrive, and are segregated off into culturally de-facto ghettos, resentment brews over generations. In the cases where more open immigration is abused, such as the 9/11 terrorists who came to the United States, it's throwing out the baby with the bathwater to question immigration as a whole, rather than focusing hard on how to mitigate the exceptional cases of abuse.
Essentially, it boils down to two issues:
Morally, we all are descendants of immigrants, or at least most.
Economically, most immigrants are willing to work hard. Combined with the fact that our society has a birth rate below replacement rate (1.3 vs. 2.1) we need immigrants just to keep our standard of living. And if we can give them a better life at the same time, it’s definitely great.