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.
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.
Only part of it. Everyone that forces you into a corner with nowhere else to go. Endure unfair rent, endure shitty jobs with shitty pay. Boomers and part of my generation were the last (here at least, can’t judge other countries) where appartments searched for tenants and jobs searched for people. We managed to turn it around. If you now place an ad for a job or an apt, you’re drowning in applications in mere minutes. Literally. No matter how shitty either of which is. Housing-market especially. It’s like dating for ugly and poor men. Probably even worse.
That’s the dream of landlords and employers. And mass-immigration made it possible. e.G. my home-city went from 350.000 people to >600.000 in just a generation. Nearly same amount of apts and jobs. It shows :-)
Also, guess what. I can be part of the problem and still dislike it, even though i highly profit from it. I didn’t make the rules.
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.
