OLD CONTENT contd.
One especially stupid argument I have been hearing a lot recently from rightists is how "open borders only benefits employers".
If this were true, then why do the immigrants themselves migrate? Do they have an irrational love for employers that compels them to move to another country solely to do employers a favour? Of course not.
Open borders most obviously benefits immigrants themselves, or else they wouldn't be deciding to migrate!When rightists say "open borders only benefits employers", what they are actually doing is trying to condition the listener to not view the immigrants themselves as people at all.
Do open borders benefit employers? Sure, as it gives them a larger pool of people from whom to choose whom to hire. It also benefits workers by giving them - so long as they are willing to migrate - a larger selection of employers to apply to work for. Thus the benefit is far from lopsided to the advantage of employers. Workers can use the available option of taking up work elsewhere as leverage to persuade an existing employer to offer higher wages, no less than can employers use the available option of hiring someone else as leverage to persuade an existing worker to accept lower wages. It will all sort itself out given time. The only thing preventing this is in fact none other than rightists threatening to violently close the borders and deport immigrants, thereby interfering with the otherwise straightforward negotiation process between workers and employers by adding a risk that each might be suddenly prohibited at any minute from keeping their side of the bargain towards the other.
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But when presented with this argument rightists will just accuse immigrants of being purely driven by economic interests, as opposed to natives who are supposedly more "patriotic"...
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Paying taxes is the most basic form of patriotism. Immigrants are people who make a conscious decision to stop paying taxes to the state they left in order to pay taxes to the state they have arrived in over any other state in the world. This goes back to the following point:
Even worse are the anti-immigrant propagandists who refer to immigration as “invasion” for the sake of crude alarmism, utterly disregarding the actual meaning of invasion. If State A invades State B, former taxpayers to State B will now be paying taxes to State A instead (ie. State B loses taxpayers; State A gains taxpayers). In contrast, if inhabitants of State A migrate to State B, these former taxpayers to State A who have migrated will now be paying taxes to State B instead (ie. State B gains taxpayers; State A loses taxpayers). Thus in fact immigration is the opposite of invasion.
Also, this just in:
www.foxnews.com/media/tom-homan-ice-border-democrat-2020"They say they care about these people, they care about children dying and women being ****... they need to look in the mirror because if you keep offering enticements... 'sanctuary cities'... free health care... in-state tuition... people are going to put themselves in harm's way to come to this country," Homan told Steve Hilton on "The Next Revolution."
Who would be in harm's way if no one had to fear being deported in the first place?
The reason people rely on dangerous methods/routes of entry is because they fear Homan & Co. catching them and deporting them! What people need is the assurance that no one will be trying to deport them under any circumstances, and then they will have no reason not to use the safest methods/routes of entry available.
(Homan & Co. are covered here:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/enemies/ice/ )
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False Leftist Michael Brooks (Jew) pushing the rightist line on immigration
Are Westerners willing to work for the same “cheap” rates? Probably not, given their lavsish standards of living. Then why criticize immigrants who improve the economy with their additional labor?
All this talk of migrants being “exploited” is nonsensical and is a rightist talking point. Migrants who voluntarily choose to take up a job in another country are not being “exploited”.
What do you guys think?
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Exactly. It gets even more ridiculous when rightists prefer outsourcing to immigration. Both are driven by employers seeking cheaper labour, but the difference is that
outsourced labour is taxed by a foreign state, whereas immigrant labour is taxed by one's own state. This is why again it is absurd for rightists to claim to be nationalists. They are identitarians and nothing else.
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We have to start with the position that even if immigration were not economically beneficial, it should still be allowed on ethical grounds. Economic benefits are merely a bonus.
Immigrants who are a drain on public funds should be treated no differently than natives who are a drain on public funds. Either eliminate welfare (libertarian approach) or modify it into a wage conditional on sufficient labour of the state's choosing being performed by the recipient to offset it (socialist approach, which we prefer). Either way, the point is to avoid favouring natives over immigrants, since none of us choose where we are born.
With that said, I agree that GDP is not the best measure of economic health. Instead, we should place more emphasis on autarky. And
the fastest way to achieve autarky is to transplant all the currently offshore economic activity inside. Basically, everyone anywhere in the world whose labour serves a country's economy but who currently lives outside the country should be proactively invited to immigrate into the country.
By the way:
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Start calling border walls, like the one Trump and Orban had built, "iron curtains."
Fun Fact: Goebbels used the term in a Feb 1945 article (3rd paragraph, middle) well before Winston Churchill. Either way, the ZioWinners of WW2 and their supporters are most enthusiastic about iron curtains.
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And Salvini says immigrants do not contribute to Italian society:
www.yahoo.com/news/italy-nightmare-offers-chilling-preview-050009711.htmlThat fear has led to a sudden boom in grocery delivery services. The day after Conte announced the national lockdown, Rome supermarket entrances were jammed with bicycle couriers, mostly immigrants from Africa and South America, jostling for orders. By then Milan had settled into a home-delivery routine that has left residents waiting more than a week for a slot to get groceries.
Bonus:
qz.com/africa/1806374/nigerian-migrants-in-sicily-build-an-afrobeats-scene/
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More immigrants "not contributing to society" (according to rightists):
www.ekathimerini.com/251023/gallery/ekathimerini/in-images/migrants-sew-masks-at-moria-camp---
And still more immigrants "not contributing to society" (according to rightists):
www.yahoo.com/news/eight-u-k-doctors-died-184609860.htmlEight U.K. Doctors Died From Coronavirus. All Were Immigrants.
...
For a country ripped apart in recent years by Brexit and the anti-immigrant movement that birthed it, the deaths of the eight doctors — from Egypt, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Sudan — attest to the extraordinary dependence of Britain’s treasured health service on workers from abroad.
It is a story tinged with racism, as white, British doctors have largely dominated the prestigious disciplines while foreign doctors have typically found work in places and practices that are apparently putting them on the dangerous front lines of the coronavirus pandemic.
“When people were standing on the street clapping for NHS workers, I thought, ‘A year and a half ago, they were talking about Brexit and how these immigrants have come into our country and want to take our jobs,’” said Dr. Hisham el-Khidir, whose cousin Dr. Adil el-Tayar, a transplant surgeon, died March 25 from the coronavirus in western London.
“Now today, it’s the same immigrants that are trying to work with the locals,” said el-Khidir, a surgeon in Norwich, “and they are dying on the front lines.”
By the way, this is what I have been pointing out for ages:
By recruiting foreign doctors, Britain saves the roughly $270,000 in taxpayer money that it costs to train doctors locally
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California's undocumented workers help the economy grow – but may pay the cost
With a gross domestic product worth $2.448 trillion, California has the largest economy in the US, and the sixth-largest in the world. It's also the state with the most immigrants, more than a quarter of its population. These two facts are not unrelated — but the way immigrants build that economy is more complex than it seems.
Betty Yee, California state controller, said undocumented immigrants’ labor is worth more than $180 billion a year to California's economy — about equal to the 2015 gross domestic product for the entire state of Oklahoma. Labor from undocumented immigrants is fundamental not just to agriculture, but to child care, restaurants, hotels and construction.
“This is a workforce, a supply of labor from our undocumented workforce, that actually does provide just the basic foundations of these sectors and industries of being able to succeed and thrive,” she said.
Undocumented immigrants make up an estimated 10 percent of California's workforce, and the work they do is often at the bottom rung of the wage scale. That's part of what makes their place in the economy controversial and keeps the immigration debate heated. President Donald Trump argues that undocumented immigrants drain the economy, drive down wages and take jobs from US-born workers.
For the most part, economists disagree. Major studies show immigration as a whole benefits the US economy, and that undocumented immigrants have little to no impact on employment levels of native-born workers. There is, however, debate about whether low-skilled immigrant labor puts downward pressure on wages for low-skilled workers, with some studies finding no effect and others finding immigration lowers wages for some low-skilled native workers and prior immigrants.
www.pri.org/stories/2017-03-06/californias-undocumented-workers-help-grow-economy-theres-cost---
So many immigrants "not contributing to society" (according to rightists)!
qz.com/1838754/about-280000-essential-healthcare-workers-in-us-are-undocumented/
Imagine being on the frontlines of the fight against coronavirus—tending to the sick and risking your life—while anxiously awaiting news about whether you’ll soon be deported to a country you left as a child, and scrambling to do immigration paperwork just in case you catch a break.
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“Right now, we are all dependent on every single healthcare and essential worker,” says Hannah Siegel, managing director of the New American Economy (NAE), a bipartisan nonprofit immigration research and advocacy group. “The DACA community is a part of that. According to NAE analysis, there are 62,600 DACA-eligible individuals working in healthcare today. In fact, undocumented immigrants overall play a huge role in our most critical workforce, [with] almost 280,000 total in healthcare,” she tells Quartz.
“Yet worries about deportation persist for many,” Siegel adds, “and the timing couldn’t be worse.”
...
Meanwhile, the many who haven’t been able to apply for the program, though they would qualify, will have no hope of coming out of the shadows. Having risked their own health to tend to Americans and to help keep critical institutions running during the pandemic, they’ll remain underground, legally speaking, living in fear not of disease but of immigration authorities.
Not just medical workers either:
www.yahoo.com/news/were-ignored-completely-amid-pandemic-204611520.htmlOn normal mornings, Maria, an undocumented worker at an orchard in Washington state, gets up at 5:00 a.m. The 37-year-old immigrant from Mexico puts her hair up in a bun, wraps it with a handkerchief to keep it out of the way, and packs a snack for her morning break and a small meal for her half-hour lunch. Then she sets off on the half-hour drive to the orchard, arriving so early there’s often frost on the trees. Her work depends on the season; right now it’s the grueling task of securing branches to ensure they grow correctly.
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, Maria is classified as an essential worker, which means she has to keep going in even as large sectors of the economy have shut down. She has a letter from her employer to prove it. Though she says her hours have been cut in half because of COVID-19, she’s still expected to show up. It was only last week, Maria says, that her employer finally gave a presentation about maintaining six feet of distance while on the job—which she says is impossible to do—and requesting that workers wear a face cover and gloves, which are not supplied.
“The fear that we have as immigrants is something whose extent only we can know. We’re afraid of getting sick. We’re afraid of dying,” Maria tells me in Spanish. “We’re afraid of complaining at work, to our supervisors, because we’re not getting adequate cleaning supplies. We’re ignored completely.”
Maria is one of an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., many of whom are now working the essential jobs the nation is relying on—in apple orchards and grocery stores, food processing plants and hospitals. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that 6 million immigrant workers (a figure that does not take into account legal status) are in jobs on the front lines of coronavirus response, while another 6 million are in industries hardest hit by the pandemic. In normal times, undocumented labor is a pillar of the U.S. economy. In these extraordinary times, immigrant advocates say lawmakers must recognize the contributions that essential undocumented workers are making.
“At a time of crisis, when America needs a certain segment of its society to keep functioning so that we can all be safe and healthy, a significant chunk of that indispensable workforce is not formally recognized as Americans,” says Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration advocacy group. Those workers, he says, “are risking their lives in order to serve the country they call home.”
Meanwhile, rightists see no problem with this:
Yet despite paying billions of dollars annually in taxes, undocumented immigrants were ineligible for the direct deposit relief doled out by the $2.2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill. None will receive the cash assistance that millions will get as a result of the relief package passed by Congress; the payments were tied to Social Security numbers as opposed to Individual Tax Identification Numbers, over Democrats’ objections.
Most undocumented immigrants will also not receive unemployment insurance if they’re among the millions who lose work due to the pandemic. With few exceptions, undocumented workers are not eligible due to their immigration status under normal circumstances. At a time when 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits, this has left countless undocumented immigrants in financial uncertainty.
Then there’s access to testing and treatment. According to the ACLU and National Immigration Law Center, the Families First Act excluded tens of millions of people (among them, DACA recipients and Temporary Protected Status holders) from testing and treatment by not making it available under emergency Medicaid, which would lift the immigrant eligibility restrictions currently in place.
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