Aside from racism. I mean economically/socially, what issues does too much immigration cause?
How quickly your culture can absorb new people. If you’ve got a hundred people who are in culture a, and you integrate 100 people from culture b. Now culture a is 50/50. And it’s hard for culture a to maintain its traditional positioning.
If you want to maintain a culture, a people, a language, you need to gate how many people enter the population at any time. So that it can be absorbed.
You similar problems with militaries, how quickly they can ramp up new recruits will still maintaining their previous cadre culture.
There’s something to be said for culture and tradition, which have been for a long time the cornerstones of our civilization.
Everybody has their own opinion on this of course. For me, I feel that culture and tradition are in the way of progress. At some point our current traditions, cultures and values will change, they will evolve. I’m all in for a true multicultural society if there is a clear segregation between state and religion.
Problems start when the people coming in don’t share those sentiments and instead want their authoritarian culture to replace and dominate.
Edit: also, in the West democracy and equality have become part of our culture and tradition, for the most part, and those values just are not shared by lots of migrants. And you can’t tolerate those values being replaced. It’s the paradox of tolerance.
That’s a fair thing to be concerned about, but are we really anywhere near that level of immigration in the US? I can’t speak for European countries.
Like Christianity did you mean?
That said, I don’t disagree with the sentiment - the respect should come both ways and the imigrants should respect the native culture, but that also doesn’t mean they havento give up their own.
In some ways perhaps culture and tradition do stand in the way of progress, but it’s not that clear cut.
In Australia the majority of migrants are from South East Asia, which are much more conservative politically than Australia.
For example, more migration is not going to further transgender rights.
I have a feeling that this might be true of a lot of places, just because of the nature of migration.
Poorer places tend to be more conservative, and immigrants tend to leave poorer places to go to richer places.
Local culture always changes in time. Take Europe, it’s culture steeped and deeply influenced by Christianity in many countries. And yet Christianity is a religion with Middle East origins. People just don’t look at the bigger picture - or don’t want to. The change in the past was not happening to them, but it is now and that’s what matters.
The issue is though that “segregation between state and religion” is a cultural trait. It’s not something that every culture values, nor is it something that inevitably happens.
In fact, it’s almost certainly a minority opinion on a global level. Particularly in (although not exclusive to) poorer non-western countries which tend to be much more conservative and religious.
A small number of conservative immigrants won’t hugely impact views in the host country, but a sizable number (particularly if they are concentrated in certain areas) absolutely can.
Is culture really that big of a problem? Especially for the US, which prides itself on being a melting pot of different cultures
Also, you asked the question, I gave response. That’s how public discussion works.
…no shit? Weird passive aggressive comment out of nowhere
Edit: a perfect example of how bad things can be, and why you don’t want large numbers coming in without integration. https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/48b6b106-78ac-4a36-8a42-9fa62afb67f2.jpeg
What country is this?
Plus, frankly, we have enough crackpots and extremists of our own. Just letting everyone in, with no limits, you end up with even more, and that may be more than any culture can take.
Strange you think “newcomers = crackpots”. All the immigrants I’ve met have been normal, sane people. Most crackpots are born citizens. It could be that letting in immigrants will dilute the ratio of crackpots.
Doesn’t matter where they’re from, why they’re extremists, it’s a matter of numbers.
I don’t really foresee ISIS allying with the KKK. Obviously it’s not ideal to have either, but they’re working against each other as much as against society.
How many extra strict adherents can we take on without disrupting the general trend towards a kind of religious neutrality?
That’s a good question. I’d be interested in any data. I could see a religious sect taking over a government (democratically) and then using their power to enforce religion. But also, again I don’t foresee different religions working together on this, and it may be that the more different religions we throw together the more they cancel themselves out - it’s harder to believe your god is the real god when you’re surrounded by other people with different gods who also believe THEIR god is the real god.
That’s just me spitballing though, like I said I don’t really have any information one way or the other.
America is a nation of immigrants so I don’t really understand this argument. Cultures don’t really integrate that way, plus assimilation is a generational thing.
A 2018 study in the American Sociological Review found that within racial groups, most immigrants to the United States had fully assimilated within a span of 20 years. Immigrants arriving in the United States after 1994 assimilate more rapidly than immigrants who arrived in previous periods.
Measuring assimilation can be difficult due to “ethnic attrition”, which refers to when descendants of migrants cease to self-identify with the nationality or ethnicity of their ancestors. This means that successful cases of assimilation will be underestimated. Research shows that ethnic attrition is sizable in Hispanic and Asian immigrant groups in the United States.
By taking ethnic attrition into account, the assimilation rate of Hispanics in the United States improves significantly. A 2016 paper challenges the view that cultural differences are necessarily an obstacle to long-run economic performance of migrants. It finds that “first generation migrants seem to be less likely to success the more culturally distant they are, but this effect vanishes as time spent in the US increases”. A 2020 study found that recent immigrants to the United States assimilated at a similar pace as historical immigrants.
The US really is a special case even within just America and really cannot be compared to today’s refugee hotspots like Europe at all. For starters, US culture is very young and mostly made up of invaders and migrants. There is very little native culture still there as it has been assimilated for hundreds of years, mostly by Europeans. On top of that, there have been heavy crackdowns on migrant cultures as well, making it anything but the organically grown culture it often claims to be. And as such I think it is a bad example of how unchecked mass migration can work because it didn’t work for the natives and it didn’t happen for the modern US. It does show that strong migration can lead to great success, though it’s still far less densely populated than Europe even now so a direct comparison is still difficult.
The economic benefits of immigration also applies to European countries, despite the racist sentiments many Europeans have towards immigrants. Additionally, the West’s destabilization of the Global South, from war and climate change, has caused the increase in people seeking asylum and immigration.
The crackdowns on migrants and the deliberate two-tier immigration system is certainly a problem, and is deliberate in order to coerce illegal immigrants into very low paying jobs with no workers rights under the threat of deportation.
Immigration was not the cause of the genocide of the Native Americans, that was due to Settler Colonialism and Dehumanization. That is not like today. Immigrants are not settler colonialist like the early Americans. Additionally, it is the US citizens who are dehumanizing Immigrants, not the other way around. Immigrants are a positive, the only negative is the reactionary violence by racist far-right domestic terrorists.
Well good thing we’re not taking in 330 million immigrants all at once then, so this will never be a problem.
You know there are other countries tries right?
A lot of european countries are only a few million people…
are European countries regularly taking in migrant populations equal to their countries population?
Immigration only really causes economic issues with bullshit employee specific visas like H1Bs - those visas trap immigrants in powerless positions where they’re unable to advocate for fair compensation and drive down overall wages.
Everything else is fucking bullshit xenophobia.
Would more supply of workers (even naturalized ones) not drive down wages too?
Eh, it doesn’t really seem like that tends to happen… economies are weird and if you keep adding people you tend to just get more and more service jobs.
Doesn’t sound that weird. More people means more people to serve, so more service jobs are needed.
An increase in supply would reduce wages, unless it also increases demand. If you think about wages in cities vs rural areas, you’ll see that most of the time more people = more economic activity = higher wages.
Where this breaks down, is if there’s barriers of entry that prevent immigrants from participating in the economy fully. If immigrants aren’t allowed to legally work or start business (as happens with some asylum seekers or ‘illegal’ immigrants) then they are forced to compete over a small pool of off-book / cash-in-hand jobs, which could see a reduction in wages without a significant increase in overall economic activity.
Infrastructure is a large issue. Border towns can become saturated, which will reduce living conditions, and when immigrants move to larger cities, they can often have trouble finding places to live. A lot of this can be because of a communication barrier. Sometimes that is because there are too few to translate, but there can also be educational issues. As much maligned as the US education system is, it is better than some others, and when your culture eschews school for an early start at earning a paycheck, communication in any language becomes a challenge.
Many issues can be overcome, or at least minimized, by compassionate workers, which many that work with immigrants are, but there isn’t enough funding to get compassionate people where they are most needed. Supporting increased budgets at the border isn’t always about putting guns on the border, it can be about improving the infrastructure that helps get people where they need to be in more efficient ways. I’m starting to ramble, though, and I think I’ve given a partial answer to your question.
From an economical standpoint, immigrants bring in more taxes and labor, which can go towards infrastructure and social infrastructure like education and housing
If immigration leads to more unemployment, then that is an economic problem, especially in the hypothetical case where the social benefits system is getting more and more strained by an influx of unemployed people. But generally, I think that you can expect that the immigrants will soon find employment. Besides that, there’s the cultural aspect that @jet@hackertalks.com mentioned. You could also make the point that the country’s infrastructure is more and more stressed as the population grows, but that is fixable and potentially counteracted by the labour potential of the immigrants themselves (i.e., qualified immigrant work forces can make a large-scale infrastructure overhaul possible that will lead to greater national capacities and a net benefit for the entire population).
Aside from these things, I would argue that most of the other reasons boil down to xenophobia or racism.
but that is fixable and potentially counteracted by the labour potential of the immigrants themselves
That’s how I would deal with immigration in my power fantasies. I’m sure in reality it’s much more complicated than that, but the basic idea of bringing in immigrants and using their labor to build more infrastructure (and paying them a fair wage for it) seems sound. Coupled with pro-housing policies and free education - not necessarily college but trade school and language classes.
Immigration in excess and esspecially in combination with exploititive or unenforced labour laws and mismanagement of other resources and infrastructure, can decrease wages, and cause shortage of key resources. For example, if there is no new housing being built, but there is very high immigration levels, housing prices will rise, and availability will be limited.
Usually because those responsible for regulating housing are heavily invested in it, and like the fact that high immigration is pushing prices up. In the case of more blatantly malicious governments, it can also be used to encourage divisionism, or to weaken the power of the working class. At best, its just because building housing (esspecially in more extreme climates) is slow and expensive. As usual, most things lead back to corrupt governments and capitalism.
Fair point. I say “why not just build houses” as if it’s easy, but it’s really not. If I were King of America I could force simultaneous policy changes (more immigration + more housing) but that’s unlikely to happen in reality.
Typically these quickly built housing is of such crappy quality that only immigrants will want to live there (because they can’t afford anything else anyway). This leads to the development of ghettos, with leads to the typical problems from crappy schools (that traps the kids in the lowest social class) to no cultural assimilation.
So have and enforce building codes. Sounds like a simple problem with a simple solution.
