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Immigrants are not only not a detriment to society, they are in fact a positive. Even the ones people in my area get mad about despite being hours and hours by interstate from the nearest border. More workers means more shit can get done, everything you’re mad about is because the system sucks and is designed to keep us in poverty.
People act like jobs are a non-renewable resource that, once filled, that’s all you get. This is a total misunderstanding of how consumer based economies work. Economic activity is demand driven. More consumers = more demand = more jobs. This is obvious if you think about it. It’s why cities can exist rather than collapse once hitting a certain population because all the jobs are taken and no one can work anymore. It’s why you find way more opportunities in cities rather than podunk rural villages.
Where the trouble comes in is that the population growth and job opportunities growth doesn’t necessarily happen at exactly the same rate at exactly the same time. There can be pain in the transitional period between when the population growth happens, and when the new demand stimulates the new job opportunities. That isn’t a reason to try and stifle the population growth. It’s a political issue. Something like universal basic services (or UBI), or a universal jobs guarantee where the government puts people to work on infrastructure projects (social housing in particular seems like a good idea) or the like, like New Deal era USA did until they can find something more to their liking would do a lot to soothe that pain.
Ultimately, the new economic activity that’s created from the growth is a good thing and ought to be embraced.
More consumers = more demand = more jobs.
Yes but what if some of those people are brown??
Clearly your country’s immigration system isn’t labyrinthine and bureaucratic enough. Add enough systematic hatred and anyone can be turned into a burden to society.
Here in the Netherlands, immigrants are not allowed to work, so everything has to be provided to them by the state. The construction industry has been regulated and defunded so that building houses for the lower class is never profitable and is only built through quotas that are too low to meet demand, leading to immigrants competing with locals for extremely rare housing, leading to abuse victims being forced to stay with their abusers or go homeless. They are not taught the local language and children have to go to segregated schools to prevent them from forming attachments. There is an army of bureaucrats, cops, lawyers, judges, and public defenders involved in determining whether they have the right to stay, regulating how they live, enforcing how they live, litigating how they live, appealing litigation, and going after immigrants who are required to leave.
Here in the Netherlands, immigrants are not allowed to work, so everything has to be provided to them by the state
wait how do i immigrate to the netherlands, asking for no particular reason
Exactly. If capitalism was great at using all resources effectivly, then it clearly means that there should be no unemployment at all. After all it is a waste of work time.
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So you are saying landlords are the problem? /s
This but unsarcastically
Yes, but also cynically.
Only part of it. Everyone that forces you into a corner with nowhere else to go. Endure unfair rent, endure shitty jobs with shitty pay. Boomers and part of my generation were the last (here at least, can’t judge other countries) where appartments searched for tenants and jobs searched for people. We managed to turn it around. If you now place an ad for a job or an apt, you’re drowning in applications in mere minutes. Literally. No matter how shitty either of which is. Housing-market especially. It’s like dating for ugly and poor men. Probably even worse.
That’s the dream of landlords and employers. And mass-immigration made it possible. e.G. my home-city went from 350.000 people to >600.000 in just a generation. Nearly same amount of apts and jobs. It shows :-)
Also, guess what. I can be part of the problem and still dislike it, even though i highly profit from it. I didn’t make the rules.
Please look up actual statistics on population figures and housing market before making claims like that.
Nearly all urbanisation is driven by people relocating inside the country, not immigrants, and nearly all cities with massive affordable housing problems have huge amounts of empty flats that are kept off the market, artificially price inflated or are only used for short term holiday rentals.
Seriously, look it up for your city. Usually these figures are available online if you look a bit for them.
Nope, there isn’t. Without a good reason it’s forbidden. Sadly so, would drive prices even higher. And the “actual statistic” are obvious: Population nearly doubled. Fact. Still the same space and only a fraction of what would be needed have been built new. Fact. Less of something available with risen demand for it? Prices rise. Simple as that.
And even IF it would be as you said, wouldn’t change a thing about immigrants. They’re on top of the problem ypu describe. Can’t speak for the US though.
Come on… doubled from where? You don’t know? Look it up. Very unlikely due to immigrants.
There are past migrants too that procreate way more than we do. But why should i even argue? It’s simple logic. Even if everyone of us had 1 child. Including past immigrants and not counting them, every coming immigrant is a +1 we didn’t want nor need. Doesn’t matter how well they integrate or not. It’s just population = population +1
I have never heard so much e. G. ukranian in my life. Those hundreds of thousands need room to live.
But if you want to believe in your theory of how additional people don’t matter, sure. Go ahed. I don’t mind. It’s people like you that helped bring us here. Thanks. I hate work anyway 😁
Yes, the people who barely have clothing, risked human trafficking and perilous sea crossings are after my job, livelihood, or whatever.
Fucking conservatives and their mental gymnastics all to serve capitalism
It’s always “Immigrants are stealing our jobs!”
And never “The company owner hired an immigrant!”
Shows you just how fucked up these people are.
I think people raised under conservatism, like people raised under capitalism in general, have a counterintuitive and antisocial instinct to “punch down”.
Capitalism teaches us wealth and power come from hard work and merit, if people are poor it’s because they don’t work hard and have no merit, and that poor people are fundamentally bad people.
So if they have to choose between blaming poor migrants who are willing to work for low wages - or are forced to work for low wages, because the law doesn’t allow them to work legally or access the legal protections of citizen workers - or blaming rich, powerful business owners who decide to exploit these poor migrants, that instinct overrides logic.
Refugees are routinely used as cheap/free labor in order to undermine the local labor movement. They’re easy to exploit, isolate, and ultimately vilify when economic conditions in working class neighborhoods deteriorate.
You don’t have to bend yourself into a mental pretzel to see a large influx of skilled professionals as a threat to your personal welfare, in an economy that rewards administrators who pursue the smallest possible labor costs.
What’s more, these cheap laborers are often held up as a population that needs to be heavily policed. That creates a boom economy for people in law enforcement. The boom in law enforcement creates a patronage network that runs back to the wealthiest plutocrats and their political allies.
This creates a virtuous cycle for capitalists
- migrants drive down wages and drive up civil unrest
- unrest invites a big police force which cements “cop” as a member of the professional working class
- police brutalize the low-cost migrants while landlords gouge them for a healthy profit
- new wave of migrants come in to repeat the cycle and further stratify local wealth.
The end result is functional serfdom.
If you can be replaced by someone who isn’t a citizen, might not speak english, has no home and has no friends or connections, then you’re clearly just absolutely shit at your job, because you’ve got absolutely EVERY advantage over them. It’s crazy that rightwingers are so eager to blame immigrants for taking jobs
The column on the right could contain any group of people ‘othered’ by the right wing and it would still be valid.
The column on the right should also contain the fact that many of those horrific situations people are fleeing from were directly caused or intentionally exacerbated by the very same right wing government officials perpetrating all the shit on the other column
Exactly.
This but also those homeless encampments that should make you feel ashamed to be an American for letting your fellow citizens die of exposure, but you get angry at for “lowering local property values”
After decades of gutting all the post Great Depression social safety net, there’s this sense of helplessness and hopelessness wrt homelessness. Like, I’m a college educated professional who just dropped a six-figure down payment and sold a healthy chunk of my next 30 years of salary on a starter home. How the flying fuck is a homeless person supposed to do that?
What do you even do when you find a homeless encampment in your neighborhood? Can’t call the cops, unless you’re trying to kill them. There’s no real municipal organ other than the cops to call. My hands are kinda tied (re: 30 year mortgage paid for with my full-time job) and other than the brief, bite-sized bits of charity I can provide, there’s not a lot I can do. Nobody else in this neighborhood of overpriced starter homes has the luxury to deal with this. There’s no social roadmap for working with homeless people, nothing we’ve been trained to do to help and nobody to turn to.
The fascist response is the one that our municipal government and social structure best provide for. Its incredibly easy to get a dozen cops on the corner to start brutalizing people.
The socialist response is functionally impossible and one that’s often socially taboo. Its incredibly difficult to get anyone connected with public sector services or private charities. If you’re living in an apartment, its not like you can just talk to the landlord about opening up an empty unit next door to help this person off the street. And shy of turning your house into a homeless AirBnB, there’s very little you can do to offer them any long term material aid.
So we tend to see people adopt a fascist mentality, entirely because its the one that’s made the easiest to embrace.
No easier group to scapegoat than one that is literally defined by its complete lack of resources.
Our perpetually massive homeless population is probably part of the slippery slope that eased today’s conservatives into thumping their chest and openly hating and wishing harm on everyone who isn’t them loudly and proudly without so much as a dog whistle.
I wished fascists could read, maybe then we wouldnt need a meme lile that to explain a very simple thing.
But here we are, people so dumb they believe any shit that comes out of a Russian fake-news-farm.
And please dont give me the “but but but they are like us! Giving names doesnt solve a thing!” Bullshit.
If they were like me, i wouldnt need to write this shit in 2024.Unfortunately it seems like people listen and believe whatever they want, while the truth is complex, messy, and difficult.
No amount of crayons and slowly drawn pictures can make those people change their minds.
As Nixon (?) said: tell someone they’re better than a visible minority, and they’ll give you their last cent (or something to that effect)
That’s the one, thank you.
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Are you suggesting that hundreds of thousands people that are not yet have found their waybin the country are not putting a massive strain on the social infrastructure?
Hundreds of thousands compared to what? That’s a rounding error compared to 450 million Europeans for example.
If we’re talking Europe as a whole, there are quite a few more refugees coming here. Around 6 million every year, according to the European Commission.
That is the total number of refugees hosted in the EU, not the yearly figure.
Nope, that’s 23 million.
Source? Because that is not what the source you linked before says. And also highly unlikely because the global number of refugees according to the same source was 36.4 million at mid-2023.
Yes, I was conflating the numbers of immigrants with the number of refugees.
According to the source, yes, there are currently 36 million refugees globally. Around 10% of those are in the EU. That’s 3.6 million.
And that’s still the total and not the yearly increase, although admittedly the total did increase recently quite a bit due to the war in Ukraine. And it is still a tiny number compared to the total population in the EU.
According to the link above, 6.98 million people immigrated to the EU in 2022. In the same year, around 1 million new asylum claims were filed.
You are confusing immigrants with refugees. Most of the regular immigration is due to people taking up jobs and is coming from nearby non-EU countries like the UK.
Which we’re lucky to have cuz we don’t have enough kids.
Yes! But facts matter.
True that
Except that the “facts” are not supported by the source they linked.
O
We don’t have enough kids because many families that would like to have kids can’t afford them.
Yap our civ is like a trap
Truth is we need people so we are lucky to get them
If we’re talking Europe as a whole, there are quite a few more refugees coming here.
Look at how much money the European states are spending on staffing up their militaries and compare it to what they’re spending to aid refugees out of the wars in North Africa and along the Russian border.
Look at the French involvement in the Libya Civil War from 2014 to 2020. Check out how they’re still trying to fuck around in Algeria and Tunisia. Syria has been subject to “liberation” since the Green Revolution of 2013, and guess what’s happened since.
Now we get an earful about how expensive things have become, as boats full of North African refugees show up on their shores.
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Many of them can’t. There’s a very limited pool of jobs you can do when you do not speak the local language.
I generally agree with the sentiment, and I generally view immigration as a positive. That being said, to suggest that immigration doesn’t put any kind of pressure on housing, employment, and social services (at least short term, probably not long term), will defeat your argument before it reaches the ears of the people who need to hear the rest of it.
There is such a thing as good immigration policies and the benefits often outweigh the cost. But even if they don’t they are dwarfed by the other issues mentioned here.
So y’all don’t see a connection with overwhelmed local community infrastructure, the lack of affordable housing, not investing in enough in schools and healthcare, and a tidal wave of immigrants at ridiculously high levels?
Yeah, not all problems are connected, but some are. And while it’s ultimately the fault of the politicians for creating the immigration policies, immigrants still have free will.
There is no “tidal wave” of immigrants anywhere in Europe nor in other “developed” countries. All the problems you mention exist on their own and would affect the local population just as much if there were no immigrants. Edit: we could argue about “immigrants” Vs. “refugees” here, but the regular immigrants don’t come in small boats.
That’s a straight up lie and you know it. 8 million in 4 years is a tidal wave no matter how you slice it.
Source? There are not even 8 million refugees in all of the EU together. The total refugee population is around 7 million in the entire EU.
And even if they would have all arrived in the last 4 years (which they didn’t, less than half did & mostly from Ukraine), that “tidal wave” of around 1.5% of the total population sure is massive /s
Edit: The 8 million “immigrants” figure for the US is fake news as well.
Given all the immigrants I know put a lot more back into the economy than they get out of it, I suspect the only connection here is more likely those multinationals not paying their taxes due to loopholes that shouldn’t exist. Especially since the record profits they generate as a result of this are not reflected in the workers wages either. Where does all that money go I wonder? Probably on that increasing the gap between the rich and poor.
Nice anecdotal evidence there bud.
Do you have some factual evidence to refute it?
Refute that you met an immigrant who paid taxes? It’s not something to refute.
The fact that I’ve never met an immigrant that doesn’t pay more back in than they get out would at the very least suggest there are far more of them than ones that are a burden on society. But if you have no interest in facts, statistics or evidence, what business do you have in the world of political discourse?
So y’all don’t see a connection with overwhelmed local community infrastructure, the lack of affordable housing, not investing in enough in schools and healthcare, and a tidal wave of immigrants at ridiculously high levels?
No. I don’t.
The problem is not immigrants.
The problem is a broken government system that fails to allocate resources effectively.
The problem is whole ass political parties are incentivized to keep the system broken so they can blame immigrants and leftists/liberals and get votes.
I mean, if you make it illegal for an undocumented immigrant to get a driver’s license, you don’t get to complain that undocumented immigrants are driving without licenses. If you make it illegal for undocumented immigrants to work legal jobs, you can’t complain that undocumented immigrants are working under the table for sketchy employers at shit wages. You know?
There’s only so many resources, no country can take millions of people in a single year and ramp up quickly enough to handle them.
I disagree. Countries don’t have to “handle” people. Most people can handle themselves - if the laws and government allow it. Immigrants don’t want to live in poverty and dependent on welfare any more than citizens do. They want to work, they want to have homes, they want to support themselves and their families. And if they get forced into accepting welfare or engaging in illegal work or criminal activity, it’s because a broken immigration system doesn’t allow them to live or work legally.
Ninety percent of the “border crisis” in the US or the “refugee crisis” in Europe could be solved if countries just let people in and gave them work permits.
Some people need help, I realize. And if social services in Western countries weren’t so overloaded and underfunded by bad government policies they’d have room to help immigrants as well.
I mean, one in three calories produced in the United States is thrown away. Wasted. When you complain about food banks being overloaded by hungry immigrants, don’t blame the immigrants, blame the stores that dump millions of dollars of product straight into dumpsters covered with bleach, and the laws that allow it.
Ten percent of homes in the United States are vacant. When you complain about housing costs being driven up by immigration, don’t blame the immigrants, blame the landlords who let houses and apartments sit empty to keep rents high, and the laws that allow it.
And so on and so forth. If immigrants are “straining” our systems - and that strain has been much exaggerated in the media - it’s not because we don’t have enough resources. It’s because we badly mismanage the resources we have. It’s not a resource issue, it’s a policy issue.
The problems you point out are due to underfunding and under provisioning all these services. There is no tidal wave, just money not allocated in the right places.
Fact check: what are the numbers on “ridiculously high levels”?
At least 8 million that we encountered during Biden’s admin alone. https://budget.house.gov/imo/media/doc/ogr_icymi.pdf
That’s a fake figure some Republicans pulled out of their ass: https://www.factcheck.org/2024/02/breaking-down-the-immigration-figures/
By Gods, that is an official document from what is supposed to be an oversight committee? It reads like a biased propaganda sheet with no references and spelling mistakes everywhere.
I see it says 8 million “migrant encounters” yet there is no source for that figure stated (only numerous other reports from the same committee). Is it 8 million different people? Did they all come in this year? Who is reporting the figure?
Also I’d like to know the definition of a “migrant encounter”. That doesn’t even state they are illegal migrants, or that there was anything illegal about the encounter. Who are they encountering?
The number of unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. in 2022 (11.0 million, and the most recent year we have complete data for) was still below the peak of 12.2 million in 2007.
Now, migrant encounters (i.e., at the border) are at their highest levels in recorded U.S. history (249,735), but still not far removed from the previous peak in 2000 (220,063).
The fluctuations over time may have less to do with whatever border security/immigration policy an administration has in place at a particular time, and more to do with how other countries are performing relative to us (i.e., when things are shitty in other countries, we receive more immigrants, and vice versa). And like others in this thread have mentioned, any strain on the economy unauthorized immigrants exert is a drop in the bucket compared with other factors.
So, no, there is not a sudden “ridiculously high” wave of immigration recently. It is fear mongering and you are buying into it. This is also not to say unauthorized immigration isn’t an issue at all; it clearly has been trending upwards considerably since 2017. It is an issue, just not the behemoth that the GOP is making it out to be, and most certainly not the primary (or even secondary) cause for our economic woes.
Not if they pay taxes. While a lot of them can duck income tax, property and sales taxes will still get them.
Oh yes, they’ll steal SSN numbers so they can pay taxes. Do you honestly believe that?
An SSN is not required to pay taxes.
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Too true and high effort to be a meme
POSSIBLE CAUSES OF YOUR PROBLEMS: too much left-wing propaganda on lemmy.
Well it’s in the manifesto of solarpunk, not so astonishing. " At its core, Solarpunk is a vision of a future that embodies the best of what humanity can achieve: a post-scarcity, post-hierarchy, post-capitalistic world where humanity sees itself as part of nature and clean energy replaces fossil fuels. The “punk” in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction. "
But I’m new on lemmy, not sure how strongly communities has to follow the instance’s rule on that.
An asshole billionaire fleeing from something is also a situation I can’t comprehend but, on the other hand, fuck 'em.
