Immigrants are not only not a detriment to society, they are in fact a positive. Even the ones people in my area get mad about despite being hours and hours by interstate from the nearest border. More workers means more shit can get done, everything you're mad about is because the system sucks and is designed to keep us in poverty.
People act like jobs are a non-renewable resource that, once filled, that's all you get. This is a total misunderstanding of how consumer based economies work. Economic activity is demand driven. More consumers = more demand = more jobs. This is obvious if you think about it. It's why cities can exist rather than collapse once hitting a certain population because all the jobs are taken and no one can work anymore. It's why you find way more opportunities in cities rather than podunk rural villages.
Where the trouble comes in is that the population growth and job opportunities growth doesn't necessarily happen at exactly the same rate at exactly the same time. There can be pain in the transitional period between when the population growth happens, and when the new demand stimulates the new job opportunities. That isn't a reason to try and stifle the population growth. It's a political issue. Something like universal basic services (or UBI), or a universal jobs guarantee where the government puts people to work on infrastructure projects (social housing in particular seems like a good idea) or the like, like New Deal era USA did until they can find something more to their liking would do a lot to soothe that pain.
Ultimately, the new economic activity that's created from the growth is a good thing and ought to be embraced.
More consumers = more demand = more jobs.
Yes but what if some of those people are brown??
Clearly your country's immigration system isn't labyrinthine and bureaucratic enough. Add enough systematic hatred and anyone can be turned into a burden to society.
Here in the Netherlands, immigrants are not allowed to work, so everything has to be provided to them by the state. The construction industry has been regulated and defunded so that building houses for the lower class is never profitable and is only built through quotas that are too low to meet demand, leading to immigrants competing with locals for extremely rare housing, leading to abuse victims being forced to stay with their abusers or go homeless. They are not taught the local language and children have to go to segregated schools to prevent them from forming attachments. There is an army of bureaucrats, cops, lawyers, judges, and public defenders involved in determining whether they have the right to stay, regulating how they live, enforcing how they live, litigating how they live, appealing litigation, and going after immigrants who are required to leave.
Here in the Netherlands, immigrants are not allowed to work, so everything has to be provided to them by the state
wait how do i immigrate to the netherlands, asking for no particular reason
Exactly. If capitalism was great at using all resources effectivly, then it clearly means that there should be no unemployment at all. After all it is a waste of work time.
Yes, the people who barely have clothing, risked human trafficking and perilous sea crossings are after my job, livelihood, or whatever.
Fucking conservatives and their mental gymnastics all to serve capitalism
It's always "Immigrants are stealing our jobs!"
And never "The company owner hired an immigrant!"
Shows you just how fucked up these people are.
I think people raised under conservatism, like people raised under capitalism in general, have a counterintuitive and antisocial instinct to "punch down".
Capitalism teaches us wealth and power come from hard work and merit, if people are poor it's because they don't work hard and have no merit, and that poor people are fundamentally bad people.
So if they have to choose between blaming poor migrants who are willing to work for low wages - or are forced to work for low wages, because the law doesn't allow them to work legally or access the legal protections of citizen workers - or blaming rich, powerful business owners who decide to exploit these poor migrants, that instinct overrides logic.
Refugees are routinely used as cheap/free labor in order to undermine the local labor movement. They're easy to exploit, isolate, and ultimately vilify when economic conditions in working class neighborhoods deteriorate.
You don't have to bend yourself into a mental pretzel to see a large influx of skilled professionals as a threat to your personal welfare, in an economy that rewards administrators who pursue the smallest possible labor costs.
What's more, these cheap laborers are often held up as a population that needs to be heavily policed. That creates a boom economy for people in law enforcement. The boom in law enforcement creates a patronage network that runs back to the wealthiest plutocrats and their political allies.
This creates a virtuous cycle for capitalists
- migrants drive down wages and drive up civil unrest
- unrest invites a big police force which cements "cop" as a member of the professional working class
- police brutalize the low-cost migrants while landlords gouge them for a healthy profit
- new wave of migrants come in to repeat the cycle and further stratify local wealth.
The end result is functional serfdom.
If you can be replaced by someone who isn't a citizen, might not speak english, has no home and has no friends or connections, then you're clearly just absolutely shit at your job, because you've got absolutely EVERY advantage over them. It's crazy that rightwingers are so eager to blame immigrants for taking jobs
This but also those homeless encampments that should make you feel ashamed to be an American for letting your fellow citizens die of exposure, but you get angry at for "lowering local property values"
After decades of gutting all the post Great Depression social safety net, there's this sense of helplessness and hopelessness wrt homelessness. Like, I'm a college educated professional who just dropped a six-figure down payment and sold a healthy chunk of my next 30 years of salary on a starter home. How the flying fuck is a homeless person supposed to do that?
What do you even do when you find a homeless encampment in your neighborhood? Can't call the cops, unless you're trying to kill them. There's no real municipal organ other than the cops to call. My hands are kinda tied (re: 30 year mortgage paid for with my full-time job) and other than the brief, bite-sized bits of charity I can provide, there's not a lot I can do. Nobody else in this neighborhood of overpriced starter homes has the luxury to deal with this. There's no social roadmap for working with homeless people, nothing we've been trained to do to help and nobody to turn to.
The fascist response is the one that our municipal government and social structure best provide for. Its incredibly easy to get a dozen cops on the corner to start brutalizing people.
The socialist response is functionally impossible and one that's often socially taboo. Its incredibly difficult to get anyone connected with public sector services or private charities. If you're living in an apartment, its not like you can just talk to the landlord about opening up an empty unit next door to help this person off the street. And shy of turning your house into a homeless AirBnB, there's very little you can do to offer them any long term material aid.
So we tend to see people adopt a fascist mentality, entirely because its the one that's made the easiest to embrace.
No easier group to scapegoat than one that is literally defined by its complete lack of resources.
Our perpetually massive homeless population is probably part of the slippery slope that eased today's conservatives into thumping their chest and openly hating and wishing harm on everyone who isn't them loudly and proudly without so much as a dog whistle.
The column on the right could contain any group of people 'othered' by the right wing and it would still be valid.
The column on the right should also contain the fact that many of those horrific situations people are fleeing from were directly caused or intentionally exacerbated by the very same right wing government officials perpetrating all the shit on the other column
Exactly.
I wished fascists could read, maybe then we wouldnt need a meme lile that to explain a very simple thing.
But here we are, people so dumb they believe any shit that comes out of a Russian fake-news-farm.
And please dont give me the "but but but they are like us! Giving names doesnt solve a thing!" Bullshit.
If they were like me, i wouldnt need to write this shit in 2024.Unfortunately it seems like people listen and believe whatever they want, while the truth is complex, messy, and difficult.
Are you suggesting that hundreds of thousands people that are not yet have found their waybin the country are not putting a massive strain on the social infrastructure?
Hundreds of thousands compared to what? That's a rounding error compared to 450 million Europeans for example.
If we're talking Europe as a whole, there are quite a few more refugees coming here. Around 6 million every year, according to the European Commission.
Too true and high effort to be a meme
I generally agree with the sentiment, and I generally view immigration as a positive. That being said, to suggest that immigration doesn't put any kind of pressure on housing, employment, and social services (at least short term, probably not long term), will defeat your argument before it reaches the ears of the people who need to hear the rest of it.
There is such a thing as good immigration policies and the benefits often outweigh the cost. But even if they don't they are dwarfed by the other issues mentioned here.
An asshole billionaire fleeing from something is also a situation I can't comprehend but, on the other hand, fuck 'em.
So y'all don't see a connection with overwhelmed local community infrastructure, the lack of affordable housing, not investing in enough in schools and healthcare, and a tidal wave of immigrants at ridiculously high levels?
Yeah, not all problems are connected, but some are. And while it's ultimately the fault of the politicians for creating the immigration policies, immigrants still have free will.
There is no "tidal wave" of immigrants anywhere in Europe nor in other "developed" countries. All the problems you mention exist on their own and would affect the local population just as much if there were no immigrants. Edit: we could argue about "immigrants" Vs. "refugees" here, but the regular immigrants don't come in small boats.
Given all the immigrants I know put a lot more back into the economy than they get out of it, I suspect the only connection here is more likely those multinationals not paying their taxes due to loopholes that shouldn't exist. Especially since the record profits they generate as a result of this are not reflected in the workers wages either. Where does all that money go I wonder? Probably on that increasing the gap between the rich and poor.
So y'all don't see a connection with overwhelmed local community infrastructure, the lack of affordable housing, not investing in enough in schools and healthcare, and a tidal wave of immigrants at ridiculously high levels?
No. I don't.
The problem is not immigrants.
The problem is a broken government system that fails to allocate resources effectively.
The problem is whole ass political parties are incentivized to keep the system broken so they can blame immigrants and leftists/liberals and get votes.
I mean, if you make it illegal for an undocumented immigrant to get a driver's license, you don't get to complain that undocumented immigrants are driving without licenses. If you make it illegal for undocumented immigrants to work legal jobs, you can't complain that undocumented immigrants are working under the table for sketchy employers at shit wages. You know?
Fact check: what are the numbers on "ridiculously high levels"?
At least 8 million that we encountered during Biden's admin alone. https://budget.house.gov/imo/media/doc/ogr_icymi.pdf
The problems you point out are due to underfunding and under provisioning all these services. There is no tidal wave, just money not allocated in the right places.
POSSIBLE CAUSES OF YOUR PROBLEMS: too much left-wing propaganda on lemmy.
Well it's in the manifesto of solarpunk, not so astonishing. " At its core, Solarpunk is a vision of a future that embodies the best of what humanity can achieve: a post-scarcity, post-hierarchy, post-capitalistic world where humanity sees itself as part of nature and clean energy replaces fossil fuels. The “punk” in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction. "
But I'm new on lemmy, not sure how strongly communities has to follow the instance's rule on that.
