heywood on 11/9/2024 at 13:13

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Well, the Twitter bros tried to accuse Haitians of cannibalism, and people didn't buy it. I guess they were hoping that pet eating would seem more plausible. After all, when I was growing up, people used to joke about people eating stray dogs and cats in the Asian immigrant communities. The immigrants eat weird stuff trope is certainly an old one.

Seriously though, we can't have a public conversation about immigration because it's a third rail issue. It's a topic that people want to get mad about but don't want to take seriously because it means addressing realities they are uncomfortable with. Politicians who try to lead people there get punished for it.

mxleader on 11/9/2024 at 16:30

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You do make some valid points, but when a country gets to the point where it is imports are greater than it's exports you will have more money leaving than coming in. Also, if you take away good paying labor jobs from those in your country, and ship them overseas, that contributes to money leaving the country instead of circulating within the economy. The only benefit to exporting labor is to increase stockholder dividends and executive pay and bonuses.

Very few companies actually suffer failures because they are unionized. There are some cases where unionized workers demand higher pay and benefits from a company that's not capable of giving them what they want. Hostess was one of those but they failed because the general population in the US has changed it's overall diet choices to either healthier options, or upgraded their tastebuds from American cafe food to gastropub grub. It's easy though to reference Ford paying its workers more because so that they could afford to buy Fords but that's not the case for companies producing random widgets or even Boeing aircraft. Maybe Boeing employees travel more when they have more money, but I don't know if that supports their own industry or not.

One of the other problems is when a countries raw resources start to dwindle or in some cases there are plenty of resources but extraction costs are higher than what it would cost to import the same materials a manufacturer would rather import the material. That of course hurts mining companies but helps transportation companies. You could shift workers but that's not easy to do.

This problem certainly isn't unique to the US though as many industrialized countries have shipped manufacturing jobs overseas in order to save a buck, and once that snowball starts rolling an avalanche soon follows. Sometimes the cost increases aren't entirely related to labor costs either and have a lot to do with environmental regulations. Coal mining might be adversely affected in a country based on environmental regulations and/or diminishing resources.

As far as immigration is concerned small amounts in any country generally helps boost economies, but massive amounts left unchecked can upturn economies very quickly to the point where it's difficult to adjust. The US as a melting pot shouldn't be overly concerned with migration and those concerns are usually related to labor competition disguised as criminal intent of immigrants that citizens claim when they feel threatened. In countries where resources and space is more limited like the UK unchecked immigration is probably more problematic economically and culturally than in places like the US. One could make the argument that entire cultures are being displaced by too high of a flow of immigrants in too short of a time period and that it is pushed on the people politically. This is where countries that have huge numbers of refugees should retain them as much as possible as cruel as that may seem. In some cases you could argue that there is politically motivated colonization happening in many countries and it's okay for more heavily melanated people to rage over past colonization but the lighter melanated people are being forced to suck it up or be labeled racists.

The most basic issue though I think is boiled down to population vs. resources in most countries and corporations and garbage politicians that exploit them both. If the livable land mass in any country could easily be expanded and they had unending resources there wouldn't be much of a reason to compete for anything. So maybe the most obvious, but also the most difficult to change, problem is the exponential increase in populations in nearly every country on Earth.

demagogue on 11/9/2024 at 16:46

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Nah, nah, there are export oriented economies and import oriented economies. Export oriented are developing countries pushing through an industrial boom, currently your Chinas, Thailands, Malaysias, Bangladeshes, Argentinas, etc. Import oriented are information economies that deal in information and services, the US, Western Europe, Japan. Which model do we want the US to follow?

US dollars are going out of the country, but they're going to spend that on US services, and (what I know painfully well working for a Japanese company) it keeps the value of the dollar boosted, as opposed to what's happening to the yen, which is in free fall so foreign goods & parts cost 1.5 times what they'd cost with dollar parity, exactly because Japan is having its own nativist reaction. We don't want the US reverting back to the 1970s or to look more like Thailand with all the social instability that comes with it.

Surging economic migration is usually a sign that your economy is booming, which is a good thing and pouring ice on labor demand isn't going to help, and/or your neighbors are economically/politically collapsing, which is a bad thing. But migrants send remittances to their families back home is one of the most efficient ways to prop up those governments, since we at least get cheap labor out of it (as opposed to just a flat handout). But one way or another the stability of the US is tied to the stability of our neighbors, so if we want the migration surge to slow down, we should help build a better regional plan. For one thing, I think the US ought to legalize drugs and turn it from a criminal to a health matter, to bankrupt the cartels and put really high taxes on them to pay for the social & health care systems we already need to deal with all the social ills they create.

All in all, I think the more a country blinds itself to what's happening outside its borders and tries to wish problems away, the more it gets, by definition, blindsided by forces beyond its comprehension. But it's also just a miserable, mean, & exhausting worldview to always be paranoid & in constant fear and rage over what looks different.

mxleader on 11/9/2024 at 18:08

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That sounds like fun... I wonder if I could modify a Roomba to change my bedpan.





I think that the US is too vast in size and population to pick one or the other because it relies on immigrants for both menial labor and information labor. The US wouldn't survive well if it didn't import various levels of labor. Now if you quickly added thousands of either type to the US the national economy might not notice but local economies would potentially be negatively disrupted. Hell, even immigrants displace other immigrants if there are enough showing up to compete.



It seems to me that the US has already reverted back to the 1970's in some ways. I mean I was just a kid then but those weren't the happiest of times



I think that a number of countries are currently experiencing high immigration from war torn and natural disaster riddled countries and the countries they are entering are not experiencing an economic boom. So they aren't showing up because they are answering a job notice on a job board that was posted on a job board at an Internet cafe.

As far as legalizing drugs in the US I don't think that would help anything because that would happen before any social systems would be put into place. Then all hell would break loose and the cartels will capitalize on it by attempting to become legitimate business entities. The exploitation of workers in South and Central America would be far worse than it is now. The US should go back to clandestine elimination of cartels. Maybe we still do that stuff but I don't know.




That's a fair point but I don't think that it's entirely fair to any of those countries to be forced to absorb all the world's problems. One country might be wishing their problems away and those problems are at the same time running away from their problems. Who's right?

mxleader on 11/9/2024 at 21:14

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His left fingers seem a bit long though. Like really long or he's doing one of those magic tricks where you pretend to pull away your thumb but it's four fingers instead.