This is the ideal characteristics of an entrepreneur or early employee or a start-up. More labour, lowers labour costs. What is the reluctance with immigration ?
Unlimited immigration is unsustainable (Europe can’t support 3bn people), so there have to be some limits.
Also, I value my culture (not in the “food & language” sense, but in “enlightenment values” sense), and have no interest in admitting more people who don’t value or respect this culture.
Finally, you need to correctly read the situation. Most pro-immigration people support it to lower labour costs. They will of course deny it and claim “humanitarian reasons”, but it was plainly obvious during Covid, with e.g. UK companies complaining that fruit is gonna rot on the fields without immigrant labour... like, have you considered hiring locals??
As far as culture goes immigrants assimilate. By the third generation it’s rare to actually be able to speak the language of their ancestors. Catholic immigrants to the US were feared as agents of Rome. Now the average American Catholic has a Protestant conception of what religion is, they’re so mixed in. Or look at Asian Americans. From the point of view of someone living in China the idea that people actually identify with this is more than a little absurd. It’s like white. This identity has no purchase in the emigrant sending countries. In the end without continuing immigration all ethnic communities that are not closed to intermarriage dissolve.
As far as humanitarian reasons go for opposing immigration controls see Fabio Rojas or Bryan Caplan. We exist.
If it were just about population, why is there no concern with natural population rise due to birth rates?
> Also, I value my culture (not in the “food & language” sense, but in “enlightenment values” sense), and have no interest in admitting more people who don’t value or respect this culture.
Surely then it would be possible to institute a "cultural test" where people who do agree with "enlightenment values" are free to immigrate. I also think it is incredibly questionable for europe to lay claim to "enlightenment values", as if those are a single unified system of values that belongs solely to europe and is matched by modern european states.
Probably because in most/all Western countries birth rates are at or below replacement rates, so the only reason the population is still rising is due to immigration.
Do you have a source for this claim?
Countries are not reluctant to allow immigration, they are reluctant to allow immigration of potentially harmful people (as long as we're below immigration capacity)
Proxies for "harmfulness" are:
- different culture estimated via parent citizenship, religion, and language
- less wealth, estimated by income (having a job already), income potential (education) and/or money in the bank account
In general, power-hungry politicians should aim for obtaining higher populations because it means more power.
The less they pay, the better for them. Don't like the misery salary? Look at the queue of people looking for the job willing to work for less.
It is middle and lower class workers who hate competition from low income workers. The miserable salary in the "rich" country is being rich in a poor country.
It is the middle and lower class those that suffer from the higher criminal rates because they are the ones who are being stolen or their houses occupied.
The rich live isolated in good places, with private security.
There are additional problems like the cultural one. Islam religion demands that their believers do not integrate ever in a non Muslim society so bringing millions of them to a non Muslim society means fragmenting it over time, like in Albania or Georgia(from Europe, not the American one).
Like the way they see / treat women to start with... People who want to be "nice" to migrants don't realize how bad that can be.
I suggest visiting some suburbs of Paris, or Stockholm. Furthermore, we are already in the EU, which is a trade-block only, favoring capitalists ( and driving down labor costs ).
edit: If you want hard numbers, look up the labor participation for NL.
Also, I noticed that the more socialist a country leans the more difficult it is to immigrate largely due to the potential burden that person may place on society (they require you to have skills or capital, not have certain diseases, certifications, ect).
On the condition that the welfare state is minimal, though.
Most people who are critical of capitalism are conflating capitalism and corporatism. The essence of capitalism is hard to argue against without rejecting individual rights or currency or something similarly non-controversial and ingrained in society.
[0] - https://www.heritage.org/immigration/report/the-fiscal-cost-...
They are almost entirely orthogonal.
The intersection is in the relationship between "free trade" and immigration. That is, why should goods be free to trade but not labor, not that I'm advocating either way in this comment.
Oddly, a little bit of gate keeping would actually help. Everything in moderation, a little bit of open borders, a little bit of gate keeping, a little bit of everything - but not too much. Japan might be on the opposite side of things with a little too much gate keeping. We need vigilant balance (constantly reassess, and calculate the impact of a batch immigrants across say ... 30 years, and project how we need to adjust the pipeline to maintain a healthy growth/quality of life balance).
I’ll tell you what I can’t stand though. I can’t stand people that minimize the logistical element of increasing the population of a region to a moral and emotional argument. If you don’t carefully consider capacity, and reduce the argument to platitudes of ‘this has always been a land of immigrants’, you will certainly fuck us by adding to already growing issues of a hyper competitive economy where people are fighting tooth and nail for unstable low wage gig jobs, competitive and costly higher education, hyper competitive knowledge industries, and of course the hyper hyper hyper fucked and competitive housing market.
I want us to seriously consider why we want to add more to a pot where we are already getting cramped in a variety of ways.