I’d like to start a series seeking viewpoints from across the political spectrum in general discussions about modern society and where everyone stands on what is not working, what is working, and where we see things going in the future.
Please answer in good-faith and if you don’t consider yourself conservative or “to the right”, please reserve top-level discussion for those folks so it reaches the “right” folks haha.
Please don’t downvote respectful content that is merely contrary to your political sensibillities, lets have actual discourse and learn more about each other and our respective viewpoints.
Will be doing other sides soon but lets start with this and see where it takes us.
Well, we’ve become so tolerant, we’ve forgotten that somethings are just not good, and it’s become taboo to talk about certain things.
Certain ideologies are just not compatible with western culture, specifically those who condone raping women and murdering lgbtq people. Ideologies are not races or ethnicity, they are not inherent to you like race is. Nazis are an ideology, so why give other ideologies a pass?
Furthermore, immigration hurts the average worker. A person born into a poorer country will usually work for less than a person born into a richer country. Immigrants are basically scabs, cheap abusable labor, and that’s why we let in millions into western countries.
Canadians can’t buy a house, the UK can’t get a doctors appointment, Germany elected the nazis in, Italy came close to electing fascists, Sweden is the rape capitol of Europe, and America is close to electing Trump again, wages are down every where, purchasing power is down, everything is fucked.
We’ve let in so many in the name of tolerance it causes problems that we aren’t even allowed to discuss, and it’s destroying our countries.
There’s a flip side to this too. First world countries that are completely opposed to immigration are starting to see a significant population decline which will come with a whole host of other problems.
And in the US at least it’s actually extremely difficult to immigrate through legal means. You have to be a qualified professional and generally have to be sponsored by an employer to get a green card, or have family members that are citizens. The main issue is people that abuse loop holes to get into the country without going through the immigration process. And I agree, that’s a problem that needs to be solved. It really does a disservice to the hard working immigrants that work their ass off to become US citizens/permanent residents the legal way.
I think the benefits, like less enviromental impact, outweigh the problems of lower population.
You are correct, as quality of life increases overall fertility rates decrease. That does need to be solved, and immigration is part of that solution. Unlimited/unregulated immigration is not.
Difficulty with legal immigration is generally the case for almost every first world country, the US is not abnormal or exclusive there. I do not meet qualifications to immigrate to Canada, or anywhere in Europe right now even as a tech sector worker, except possibly by having family history through my ancestors. I am not arguing that US immigration policy needs a lot of work, but it’s not fair how much the US gets singled out for it as if it’s the outlier here.
But why does a fertility-rate decrease “need to be solved”? Obviously if it’s in absolute free fall that’s going to cause short-term problems, but the underlying reality is that our planet is overstressed with 8 billion humans and counting. Personally I just do not get this anxiety about fertility rates, it seems so disconnected from reality.
It only needs to be solved if the country is going to survive, so if that doesn’t matter then it doesn’t. There will be knock on results from that, because countries usually fall a grade or two when they fail, and with decreased affluence the number of children will increase again.
The reality is that if you do not have at least a replacement rate, retirement and social safety nets will fail as they become overwhelmed which leads to social unrest and upheaval. Immigration can help, but this comes with its own trade-offs. 8 billion people is also nowhere near an overstressor for the planet if fossil fuels and pollutants can be curbed, and even dropping the numbers of humans substantially will not help with unfettered greed continues to drive dirty industrialization
Look at Elon Musk, Boris Johnson, or a whole host of incredibly wealthy people with stupid amounts of children. Quality of life increase is also linked to higher economic power. This is linked to higher human capital investments, meaning that it’s now disproportionately more expensive to raise a child to be successful in the new economy with the higher quality of life. Quality of life increase generally correlates to life being disproportionately more expensive.
Solve the cost of raising children and you solve fertility rates
Sounds less like immigration hurts and more that lack of proper support networks and lack of regulation of capitalism is causing problems.
What’s the point of having a “free market” if you only want it free in the one way you prefer, and refuse to allow any other?
The invisible hand of the market is not all powerful, which is why regulation and safeguards are needed for a “free” market to function. Anti-monopoly laws, labor laws, etc. I lean libertarian, but do not embrace 100% laissez-faire economics. Immigration falls under this same framework.
The West has eliminated their manufacturing and blue collar base by outsourcing it overseas, which hurt large swaths of the working class. Outsourcing labor by importing labor from overseas to do the job cheaper here has similar results. See the agricultural sector in the US for this example. Everyone always says that the reason immigrants are needed is because Americans don’t want to do those jobs, but leave out “for the wages paid”.
Some regulation is needed, and we have had wholesale failure of meaningful regulation and complete regulatory capture by the oligarchy which started under Reagan and snowballed out of control since. Proper support networks and social safety nets have also failed, for the same reasons. Unrestricted immigration does not solve these issues, and with these holes in place does indeed hurt.
Things that aren’t a problem when everything is healthy and working as intended can definitely hurt when things aren’t healthy. Obviously the “health issues” need to be addressed to actually fix the problem, but ignoring symptoms while doing so doesn’t help.
Do you know what a union is? How about strikes and scabs? Immigrants are effectively scabs that dont know any better.
I don’t think anyone is giving them a pass?
Just not true, according to the data we have, a vast majority of workers are better off with immigration.
The only group which is hurt by it is people without high school diploma, which is bad, but the increased productivity and tax revenue could also easily be used to help those people.
How are these things caused by tolerance? The first one is a runaway unregulated housing market, and the second one is caused by austerity.
Just not true due to a huge variety of factors I am too lazy to explain right now.
Again, how is this caused by being tolerant of minorities?
“When I said that gay people are driving the wages down at Thanksgiving my family looked at me weird.”
In France the left has the following explanation most of the time: “he doesn’t have our cultural reference and doesn’t know it’s bad,” or “he’s psychologically disturbed and therefore not his fault so no prison.”
I guess I’ve seen people say this? But it’s not really the common way of thinking in most progressive spaces. Can’t really say for France specifically though, I guess.
In these cases people are usually put on involuntary psych holds, and reassessed over time, as far as I know?
Either way, not really getting off scott-free.
Theyre giving them a pass to enter the country.
I agree with most points except immigration since the workers compete in the same global economy except corporation get to pick the workers and laws ala cart while workers get stuck where they are born with huge hurdles to change that.
Their entire point is about immigration.
They went out of there way to say “not race or ethnicity” so I guess I feel that should separate out normal immigration rhetoric in my mind.
If taken in good faith
It was all immigration. Sone ideologies should not immigrate.
Oh I guess the fact that ideology is not innate and change change just makes that a mitigatable issue to me.
Do you really that the majority of them are going to just forget their ideologies?
It depends on how the immigration process works. Assimilation is a very real thing
And if they don’t assimilate?
I hear this argument a decent amount, but have never heard it actually expressed - only held up as a straw man argument on immigration issues.
None of us wants shitheads around. Some of us just want to give everyone a chance to prove whether they’re a shithead or not, before deciding whether they can immigrate.