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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
No amount of crayons and slowly drawn pictures can make those people change their minds.
As Nixon (?) said: tell someone they’re better than a visible minority, and they’ll give you their last cent (or something to that effect)
