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Comment by Factorium | Hacker News Reader

If you permanently reduce immigration, including deporting unauthorised migrants, you can achieve both of those things.

Given the cost of land and building, we should consider Western nations 'full' and only allow immigration 'swaps' from other highly developed countries.

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So your solution to inequity is to pull the ladder up behind you? What did you DO to deserve to be born in a Western nation?

It's interesting we're thinking of it as "pulling the ladder". As if the only way to make it was to come to the west.

Why do foreign countries not simply develop themselves instead? Build your own ladder, so to speak!

The issue with this though is two fold:

1.) You cannot have a nation of college degree high skilled workers. At least until robots and AI are widespread. Being rich is a lot less fun when you cannot spend it anywhere, because none of those places have a staff.

2.) Since people aren't having kids, and we love to saddle the future with liabilities, someone has to fill that void.

All the hot shot AI inventory management software in the world is useless without grunts actually executing it's guidance on the ground.

1) The ratio of people with a tertiary degree is probably too high. In past decades, only about the top 25% had university degrees:

https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/files/images/graph_month-stat_...

2) Fertility is heavily influenced by the availability of housing. Without immigration, house prices will fall and wages will rise, providing a boost to fertility until the population equalises.

https://www.nber.org/digest/feb12/impact-real-estate-market-...

With mass immigration you shortcut that, and simply end up replacing the original population, probably with negative overall effects if the incoming population is not genetically (average IQ, predisposition to violence) or culturally (respect for women etc.) aligned.

You do realize intra-country migration has the same effect right? In the US, the majority of counties are losing population, because people are moving to cities.

You're advocating for internal passports and residency permits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou

You'll be downvoted, but it would be interesting to set a quota based on how attractive other countries are. IE, the UK can only allow in 2X the number of immigrants from country Y if country Y allowed in 1X immigrant in the past year.

You'll also have nobody to work in the hospitals or pick food for you :)

Until they raise their wages, which is the entire point. Wages have been kept artificially low in the west because of migration for decades and it’s coming to a head.

No place on Earth is remotely close to being "full", and the economy isn't a zero sum game. Migrants aren't different from newborns (and simply people in general) in the way they don't "take away" some fixed pie of jobs and homes, they're how new jobs become needed and new homes get built (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy).

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