Immigration: Taboo or not

[Kalbear]

25 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

So you’re telling me Switzerland’s standard of living would be higher if they let 10 million refugees from an impoverished third world country settle there tomorrow?

Yeah, tell me another one.

I honestly dont know that much about Switzerland. Do you? Do they have the housing needed to support that? Do they have the economy? 

In general 10 million people going anywhere isnt immigration- it's a refugee crisis. That isnt how immigration has ever worked. Typical fearmongering. 

[Kalbear]

Now mind you, in the us that sort of thing probably would work. We have absurd housing surplus in many areas of the country that is literally sitting around. If you can direct those immigrants to certain cities it would be a massive win for everyone. Less crime, more people to spend.money, more jobs, more families. 

[Ran]

From the Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics, a 2010 article examining the agreement with the EU that doubled the rate of immigration into Switzerland:

Quote

... it [is] possible to identify three channels through which the migration agreement affected the Swiss economy: First, under the new regime, excess demand for labor raised the growth rate of foreigners with residence permits more quickly. Second, shortages in the Swiss labor market also attracted larger numbers of cross-border and temporary workers (work permits up to one year). These two effects give rise to increased upward flexibility of labor supply in upswings, mitigate the incidence of labor shortages, dampen inflation and give leeway to higher GDP growth from the supply side. Third, the new immigration regime has also affected the demand side of the economy: Along with the stronger reaction of the foreign labor force, foreign population rose more quickly in the recent upturn as well. This stimulated GDP growth from the demand side and thereby counteracted the inflation dampening supply-side effect of immigration to a fairly large extent.

Immigration is good.

As others say, it's fearmongering to reduce this to pushing strawmen arguments that no one is making -- no one has proposed moving 10 million refugees into Switzerland in a year -- to avoid accepting the fact that most developed nations would benefit from immigration and most countries (Switzerland included) recognize this.

[Free Northman Reborn]

24 minutes ago, Ran said:

From the Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics, a 2010 article examining the agreement with the EU that doubled the rate of immigration into Switzerland:

Immigration is good.

As others say, it's fearmongering to reduce this to pushing strawmen arguments that no one is making -- no one has proposed moving 10 million refugees into Switzerland in a year -- to avoid accepting the fact that most developed nations would benefit from immigration and most countries (Switzerland included) recognize this.

According to Google, Swiss immigration policy is tightly controlled, based on strict skills requirements and limited quotas for non-EU citizens, and for limited work seeking time periods even for EU citizens.

So basically, the “good” type of immigration as described in my original post. 

[Jo498]

Immigration is good for some, bad for others, very much depending on circumstances. (Truism but nevertheless true.) Tightly controlled migration that admits mainly/only highly qualified people (with a job offer etc.) is probably good for them (can earn more than at home) and maybe good for their employers but can be bad for other wage-earners in that field (more competition, lower incomes) and the countries of origin (brain drain). The Balkans are drained of medical personnel because they are moving from Bulgaria to Slovenia and from Slovenia to Austria or Germay. May the devil take the hindmost... Poorly regulated migration into welfare states where one's mere presence gives theoretically lifelong entitlement to room and board and medical services (this altogether typically costs at least about 15k $/Euro per year and person atm) may be good for the people escaping poverty of home countries but it is obviously a huge weight for the host economy to bear with very uncertain "returns".

I seriously doubt that a really honest evaluation of all such costs/benefits is even possible. Even if a net number would emerge this would hide who benefits and who loses and secondary or tertiary consequences of these wins/losses might change quite a bit. Then there are costs incurred by ethnic conflicts one might "import" or that can emerge in formerly ethnically fairly homogenic societies. The US (and Canada and Australia and NZ) and most European countries are sufficiently different in history, ethnicity, population density, welfare etc. that it is not to be expected that they should regulate immigration along similar lines.

[Free Northman Reborn]

59 minutes ago, Jo498 said:

Immigration is good for some, bad for others, very much depending on circumstances. (Truism but nevertheless true.) Tightly controlled migration that admits mainly/only highly qualified people (with a job offer etc.) is probably good for them (can earn more than at home) and maybe good for their employers but can be bad for other wage-earners in that field (more competition, lower incomes) and the countries of origin (brain drain). The Balkans are drained of medical personnel because they are moving from Bulgaria to Slovenia and from Slovenia to Austria or Germay. May the devil take the hindmost... Poorly regulated migration into welfare states where one's mere presence gives theoretically lifelong entitlement to room and board and medical services (this altogether typically costs at least about 15k $/Euro per year and person atm) may be good for the people escaping poverty of home countries but it is obviously a huge weight for the host economy to bear with very uncertain "returns".

I seriously doubt that a really honest evaluation of all such costs/benefits is even possible. Even if a net number would emerge this would hide who benefits and who loses and secondary or tertiary consequences of these wins/losses might change quite a bit. Then there are costs incurred by ethnic conflicts one might "import" or that can emerge in formerly ethnically fairly homogenic societies. The US (and Canada and Australia and NZ) and most European countries are sufficiently different in history, ethnicity, population density, welfare etc. that it is not to be expected that they should regulate immigration along similar lines.

Great post.

[OldGimletEye]

12 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

In this respect there is a massive difference between strictly vetted, skilled migration and free migration for all. The former is good. The latter is bad.

This is not as simplistic as you make it. Among other things, it is going to turn upon the production processes of a given nation. There are good reasons to think that foreign "low skilled" labor acts as a complement to native labor and capital, which raises raises their marginal productivity and the wages that go to those factors of production. So there is a quite strong case, in my view, that even "low skilled" immigration can boost a nation's standard of living.

The only thing that might offset this is the amount of debt that would need to be spent to make new immigrants eligible for a country's public benefits. Assuming full employment, the issue of new bonds might "crowd out" capital investment. But, then again, capital investment would tend to increase if low skilled immigration is complementary (and I think there are some strong reasons to think that is the case) because it raises the marginal return to capital and because natives with higher incomes would likely invest more. Also children of immigrants are likely to become like native labor and their increase would tend to raise the return on capital.

The bottom line is that saying that lower skilled immigration will make a country poorer is way over simplistic. It's going to turn on a number of parameters. I think that there is a strong case to made, that moderate levels "low skilled" immigration are likely to be beneficial.

[maarsen]

7 hours ago, Jo498 said:

Immigration is good for some, bad for others, very much depending on circumstances. (Truism but nevertheless true.) Tightly controlled migration that admits mainly/only highly qualified people (with a job offer etc.) is probably good for them (can earn more than at home) and maybe good for their employers but can be bad for other wage-earners in that field (more competition, lower incomes) and the countries of origin (brain drain). The Balkans are drained of medical personnel because they are moving from Bulgaria to Slovenia and from Slovenia to Austria or Germay. May the devil take the hindmost... Poorly regulated migration into welfare states where one's mere presence gives theoretically lifelong entitlement to room and board and medical services (this altogether typically costs at least about 15k $/Euro per year and person atm) may be good for the people escaping poverty of home countries but it is obviously a huge weight for the host economy to bear with very uncertain "returns".

I seriously doubt that a really honest evaluation of all such costs/benefits is even possible. Even if a net number would emerge this would hide who benefits and who loses and secondary or tertiary consequences of these wins/losses might change quite a bit. Then there are costs incurred by ethnic conflicts one might "import" or that can emerge in formerly ethnically fairly homogenic societies. The US (and Canada and Australia and NZ) and most European countries are sufficiently different in history, ethnicity, population density, welfare etc. that it is not to be expected that they should regulate immigration along similar lines.

If one can move to a country that let's you live a life of leisure, what stops those born there from doing the same? Your argument is crap. 

[sologdin]

not seeing the objection to migrants from the periphery following extraction of capital back to the imperial center, except for a naked imperialist rationale.

[Clueless Northman]

10 hours ago, Ran said:

From the Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics, a 2010 article examining the agreement with the EU that doubled the rate of immigration into Switzerland:

This whole article is bullshit, bit then, it's an Economics journal, so neo-liberal pro-capitalistic propaganda outlet.

GDP rose, but population rose just as much, due to immigration. Wages rose, but of course only for the top 20% - including obviously the well-paid expats that have been flocking to the country. Meanwhile, costs of living went through the roof, restaurants and bars are ridiculously priced, the wage is too damned high and is tantamount to racketeering. So even for the people who saw a reasonable rise on their earnings, there's basically no economic benefit, since it's wholly eaten away by the global rise of costs. Add to that more people, meaning more pollution, more area built over, and transport systems (both highways and public ones) close to collapse.

To put it bluntly: at some point, whole parts of Switzerland had population growth rates higher than Somalia or Cambodia.

[Jo498]

15 hours ago, maarsen said:

If one can move to a country that let's you live a life of leisure, what stops those born there from doing the same? Your argument is crap. 

You obviously don't know what you are talking about. That's why I wrote that the differences between countries and regions are too large for simple general answers. (I am not telling Americans how to solve their racial problems either because the situation is totally different than in my country.) I didn't even make an argument. I just pointed out a bunch of obvious truths, stuff that is taking place right now. Are you denying that some European welfare states are "offering" in principle lifelong welfare and medical care (on a level that may mean the brink of poverty in Western Europe but a very comfortable lifestyle compared to many African or Asian countries)? Unlike you I am living here, so I should know. Obviously, nothing *directly* stops those "born here" from doing the same. Some are doing this, sure. But there are differences. There is a difference in culture, i.e. there are lots of "soft" factors (like education, social sanctions etc.) that tend to prevent some abuses of the welfare state. There are also hoops and sanctions the bureaucracy will make able bodied natives jump through (because they might be somehow employable) whereas for migrants often simply the lack of language skills (on top of being on average low skilled which is simply true of the current majority of near/middle east and african migrants) makes it obvious that they will not find decent jobs. (And note that to make it work economically, a significant proportion would have to find more than part time or minimum wage jobs to balance the ones living on welfare because on minimum wage one pays very little in taxes.) It's about probabilities and net costs/contributions of certain demographic groups. There is of course also the case that many "born there" have contributed for years or decades in the form of taxes and obligatory payments before falling into dire straits (or their parents and relatives have done so). Generally, most people are willing to take along a certain amount of freeloaders, as long as they are not too many and don't make too much trouble, but at a certain stage too much will be too much. Straw camel back. Furthermore, in a country like Germany one is NOT entitled to welfare payments if one has moderate savings. He has to use up most of the savings first, whereas the penniless (migrant or not) has obviously no savings so he is entitled straight away. It sounds absurd, but that's exactly the way it is.

Anyway, scratch this aspect if you like. After all, a few 10^9 Euros p.a. are only a moderate amount of money. There is still the added competition for low skilled (or many other) workers, added competition in the housing market (affecting the majority in densely populated countries), brain drain for countries of origin, rising cultural/ethnic tensions (proven beyond doubt by history, just look at the US or former Yugoslavia and neither of these had centuries of a rather mono-ethnic past like France or Germany had). Note that most of these factors apply in cases of controlled migration of the skilled.

The Austrian leftist Hofbauer has recently written a book about the problems of migration from a leftist perspective, but it has not been translated.

More generally, claim of *net* benefits in wealth/well being is almost all the time cheating in some way (rising tide rises all boats etc.) and it often does not matter much because the relevant societal point is who benefits and who loses. If landlords and entrepreneurs already in the top 1-10% of wealth benefit A LOT and the lower 70% lose (due to the factors mentioned above) it might still be calculated as a "net benefit". And if the global corporatist capitalists and the crazy fringe left agree on something, especially something that used to be rare, restricted, controlled or forbidden, it is almost certainly a bad thing.

[JoannaL]

4 hours ago, Jo498 said:

 And if the global corporatist capitalists and the crazy fringe left agree on something, especially something that used to be rare, restricted, controlled or forbidden, it is almost certainly a bad thing.

Great sentence. It made me laugh but it is -unfortunately - also very true.

[JoannaL]

About the threat title  -is immigration a taboo topic:

Yes, at least in Germany it is very much a taboo topic; in newspaper you can not read anything about crime and immigrants, because these topics may not be mixed (out of fear that if you mix those, people will assume that every immigrant is criminal which is obviously nonsense -so I do not get why that is assumed - actually it is quite insulting to think that everyone cannot differantiate between all immigrants and criminal immigrants and must be saved from reading about it)

Because of that our news do sometimes do really ridiculous things to circumscribe around the fact that there was a crime of immigrants.

You can read sentences like this in our newspaper:

"An extended family was not content with the verdict and stormed the courtroom" meaning that an libyan criminal clan structure attacted the court

or - my new favorite: "partygoers" devasteted the city of Stuttgart (or Frankfurt).

all in all this is not a funny development though, because sometimes that means that crime is played down or hushed up, e.g. after the new years eve attact and mass sexual abuse on women in Cologne 2015/2016, it took 4 days of silence before the public broadcasting or other media started to report about that.

 

 

[Rippounet]

Taboo is a bit strong, but it's certainly a topic I would tend to avoid - though mostly because what I'd say isn't likely to get through.

Talking about "Immigration" is usually talking about free movement of humans across imaginary geographical lines arbitrarily delimiting the territory of fictional ("imaginary") communities. Those who oppose this tend to have a specific idea of the community they feel they belong to (generally along ethnic and/or religious lines, though people often mention culture these days) and feel this sense of belonging may disappear (or has disappeared, or is disappearing) if immigration is unrestricted. There is definitely a root cause of distrust for "others" (the outsiders, the unknown, the foreign) but it's also quite often a pretext to defend a given narrative (nationalist, religious, or "civilizational") that provides meaning both for the members' (the "in-group", the tribe) identity and for the collective's existence.

Despite the malicious minority at work (that wields political power or influence in quite a few contries), I tend to think xenophobia is rooted in ignorance and really fueled by the fact that modern life and history are obliterating the narratives that allowed our communities to make sense. After the disasters of several collective universalist doctrines in the 20th century, the dominant socio-economic ideology now emphasizes the importance of the individual (and pushes for constant competition with others) and denies the very existence of a society. Xenophobia is a terrible way (perhaps the worst) of re-building a sense of community that is in fact under threat.

The answer would seem to be to rebuild communities and develop new narratives. But the first part is made difficult by neo-liberalism (that atomizes society down to its smallest components) while the second one is still in its infancy. We are only starting to think as global citizens, and the narratives that allow us to do so lack the seductiveness of the old ones (that often provided notions of election or predestination, if not wild promises like eternal life). Instead we have the narrative of global socio-economic competition (which is really supported by the people already at the top) and the narrative of global interdependency (which gives each of us far more responsibilities that anyone wants). There are also materialistic or hedonistic trends and fashions, and certainly some aspirations for the future of humanity (like space exploration), but there is no grand narrative that enough people agree on to truly aim for open borders. Questioning our -colossal- production of goods and consumption behaviors to end feelings of scarcity may very well have to come first. Which is just an elaborate way of saying that our values as a whole have to evolve to achieve a world of open borders. Assuming as a species that is something we can achieve at all. While there is a budding ideology of global citizenship in many Western (and I believe, in some Asian) nations (which many here obviously believe in), there are also strong reactionary forces working against global cooperation and solidarity, or simply resisting what would be momentous change. We still have a long way to go.

[HoodedCrow]

I have been to the mountaintop, and I have seen the promised land. Thanks, Rippounet.

[Altherion]

6 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Despite the malicious minority at work (that wields political power or influence in quite a few contries), I tend to think xenophobia is rooted in ignorance and really fueled by the fact that modern life and history are obliterating the narratives that allowed our communities to make sense.

I'm not sure this is the case. I think immigration falls under the class of things which for many people goes something like "I don't know exactly how, but given who supports this, I'm pretty sure it's going to screw me over in some way or another." The stated goals of capitalists in this regard are completely free movement of both capital and labor. The problem is that in Western countries, we've long ago passed the point after which a gain for the capitalists is a loss for, if not quite everyone else, certainly the majority of the residents. The capitalists and their academic servants have worked really hard to convince people that for immigration this is not the case (see, for example, the idea of complementarity mentioned earlier in this thread), but as inequality increases, fewer and fewer people believe them.

7 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Which is just an elaborate way of saying that our values as a whole have to evolve to achieve a world of open borders. Assuming as a species that is something we can achieve at all.

I doubt it. The capitalist version of open borders is that people will come to wherever the capitalists need labor, obey the local laws and work, but there are a lot of cultures which are not compatible with this so in practice you have plenty of immigrants storming courthouses or burning cathedrals or something of the sort. Not every culture can get along with every other.

[mormont]

21 hours ago, JoannaL said:

Yes, at least in Germany it is very much a taboo topic; in newspaper you can not read anything about crime and immigrants, because these topics may not be mixed

A simple Google search proves that this is not true.

[The Drunkard]

On 7/26/2020 at 4:17 PM, Jo498 said:

And if the global corporatist capitalists and the crazy fringe left agree on something, especially something that used to be rare, restricted, controlled or forbidden, it is almost certainly a bad thing.

We have a bizarre situation in Australia where the conservative party froths at the mouth over 'boat people' and rubs shoulders with great replacement-theorists while importing 150,000+ people per year to address a never-ending "skills shortage" that coincidentally occurs alongside frozen or falling wages and increasing company profits year after year, a labour party that overlooks the shrinking of the middle class, a widening wealth gap, the highest youth unemployment on record and a generation priced out of capital cities in an effort to capture the #woke vote, and an environmentalist party that doesn't see continuous population growth as unsustainable. The capitalists have really done a fucking number on our politics.

[Alarich II]

22 hours ago, JoannaL said:

About the threat title  -is immigration a taboo topic:

Yes, at least in Germany it is very much a taboo topic; in newspaper you can not read anything about crime and immigrants, because these topics may not be mixed

Which newspapers specifically are you talking about? Because it seems to me that you must be reading very different German newspapers than I do. I would say immigration is not a taboo topic in Germany at all, on the contrary, we talk about it a lot and not only in JF or TAZ either in a range of newspapers (FAZ, Spiegel, SZ, Zeit).

The question wether or not newspapers should state the descent of a suspect or a criminal is also one that gets debated all the time, but in most spectacular crime cases, newspapers will not leave that out. Both your examples fall short (the "Lybian clan" was in fact a Lebanese clan and they stormed an ER, not a courthouse iirc.), because the information was out there and you'll find tons of newspapers reporting about Lebanese clans (BZ, TZ, Stern, BILD, Focus etc. etc.); the same is true for thee "partygoers" because out of hundreds, the police arrested a dozen, perhaps a few more and of those, some were of foreign descent, some weren't. To describe this as a "crime of immigrants", as you would like to, would  -a) in the immediate aftermath, literally only a few hours after the arrests, be very premature, as the police is still undergoing background checks on the arrested and - b) probably not be true for the entirety of persons involved in these incidents because the police only arrested a dozen "partygoers" or so.

[sologdin]

gods.  if the newspaper is focused so much on crime, it's a bullshit newspaper, right out of orwell.