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Immigration: Good fences make good neighbors?
moniker
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The current US system of immigration sucks. A great deal. Which is one of the driving factors of illegal immigration as many legal paths of citizenship are closed to immigrants here. Opening our borders and making them more porous to enable many more legal pathways would help improve that. Both on a humanitarian level and on a national security level as the border patrol would be chasing more drug smugglers and fewer landscapers.
Discuss.
Discuss.
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It was my understanding that our current avenues of legal immigration are both not very permissive, but also are an incredibly long and drawn out process. Your plan seems to be to both stop illegal and most LEGAL immigration. How is that a good idea at all?
Except that all areas are not equal in their capabilities to create or expand wealth due solely to ecological factors. Hell, that's what Krugman just got his Nobel for discovering. Some areas simply cannot provide the kind of pay and work that people are interested in and so their inhabitants migrate. Either within the country to dense urban areas, or, if they don't have many, to other countries with better job markets, pay, or being the center of the world for ____. We could certainly help Mexico City or Guadalajara improve their prospects, but that isn't a panacea.
What are the inherent benefits of, say, Idaho?
Potatoes?
Also Star Garnets.
There are some landlocked countries in Africa with shitty ecology for agriculture that make it incredibly difficult to either improve via development or even get them to the point of having some sort of economic base. Not that we can't help them bit by bit, but some places are inherently lower in their capability to produce/contribute things just due to their location and circumstances.
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Okay, but we have this problem with illegal immigration.
You can grow them in Ireland, or Montana for that matter. What would draw people in Idaho to stay there, and people from not-Idaho to move in? Areas where the answers to that question would fill volumes tend to grow at quite a clip due to their draw for (im)migrants.
There's a lot of science and industry that can be done in otherwise worthless areas. It also touches a bunch of states.
I'm not sure what kind of point you're trying to make. Idaho isn't an urban paradise, but it has a lot of stuff to offer.
I don't even know what barrel cheese is.
But most science, industry, and economic forces do not require being in barren areas and most of them actually occur in concentrated areas bundled up next to each other. Silicon valley, the research triangle, London, Chicago, New York. The point wasn't to pick on Idaho, it was to show that geographic or legacy decisions (all the trains could point to St. Louis instead of Chicago) have a significant impact on an area's growth which can't really be overcome just by chucking money at it. There are certainly some decisions that you can make which would be a draw, either in regulatory framework or taxes or what have you, but you're still fighting against entrenched interests or simple cartographic reality rather than enhancing their existent pull. Rural Mexico sucks and it is going to continue to suck regardless of what policies we enact. We might be able to enhance the draw of Mexico City, or Guadalajara, or, hell, Rio, rather than San Diego, but it is still going to be a point of emigration.
Make it like 1900, if you have two legs and no diseases you can walk right on in.
And you know what? That would mean that businesses would have to hire all workers at minimum wage, not paying a dollar an hour like they do now. Both the immigrants and working class natives would be helped out, the immigrants by the money, the jerbs crowd by the fact that an employer would have to look at other things when deciding between an immigrant and a native (the language barrier, primarily) and would probably take the native. See, everyone's happy.
And yeah, past infrastructure makes growth easier, sure. People have all these places in Idaho most likely because people started off up there going after the natural resources, and so they already had infrastructure in place when someone needed to drop a factory.
So. Encourage more infrastructure in more places, to make up for it. Like the whole California high speed rail thing. Obviously it's cheaper for a nation if a company does it on their own, but nations don't need to wait around for it if they feel they could benefit from dispersing growth.
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Picard: Yeah, simple answers are always the best answers when it comes to the lives of millions of people.
Except that some areas are inherently more suited to economic growth regardless, and money would be better spent improving their capacity to grow and existing economies of scale, which productivity already favours, rather than pretending that you can make an oasis sprout in the desert at random. The Emirates are going to find that out the hard way soon enough.
And seriously, Mexico isn't a hopeless cause. They have natural resources and hell ocean access, they just tend to fuck it up a great deal due to rampant corruption.
Letting the immigrants decide for themselves is actually a rather complex and complicated answer.
Okay?
I'm saying that there are reasons that immigrants come and throwing $Texas at their home is not going to change that. Throwing $Texas at their destinations might well prove to be beneficial, though.
You do know that southern California is a desert, right? Its just not as extreme temperature wise as the rest of the Southwest because it has the ocean as a temperature moderator.
And yet its one of the highest populated and productive regions in the country.
"Some areas are inherently more suited for growth" basically just means "some areas are already more productive".
Rural Mexico, yes. Mexico City and Guadalajara are viable places to live and work in, just extremely corrupt.
Yeah, being next to an ocean with international trade has had nothing to do with their growth. At all.
Rural anywhere isn't even that viable in the USA because nobody knows how the hell to make them not suck, or is unwilling to take the steps to do so.
Here's the thing though: If you cut down on the corruption then there is more opportunity and community support and Mexico City et al could better do their job of educating their populace so that those rural cesspools could grow into something that isn't horrible and depressing.
The US had a lot of shitty periods in its history, too.
The emirates are right next to an ocean. And Phoenix is not. Next?
And there's nothing necessarily wrong with Mexico. The United States is just, you know, the wealthiest country on earth. Getting Mexico up to that level is something that is essentially impossible, or at the very least more trouble than its worth.
And I don't get the idea of talking about this stuff in terms of nations rather than the immigrants themselves. People in Mexico want to go to the US. They would be helpful as a cheap labor source doing backbreaking work for minimum wage (if we let them in legally). Therefore, we should let them in. I don't know whether the citizenship rolls should be expanded or whether the qualifications for temporary migrant worker should be heavily expanded, but migrant worker status for whoever wants it solves the problem.
o_O
Do you not know anything at all about Mexico?
It's famous for its murderous drug cartels, torturous rape-murders of women, and overall rampant corruption.
I mean, it's not the worst place in the world, but there is a hell of a lot of horrible shit going down there.
It's hard to have a properly-functioning country with so much fail on the human rights level. You don't attract skilled workers to places like this: http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/763/context/archive
The fact that we have so many people working illegally is what makes it hard to estimate how many we really need, which prevents us from raising the number of work visas.
Personally though i vote for a high wall, with a moat on both sides, tons of barbed wire and concealed motion sensitive smart guns.
People tend to treat the border's status as some kind of binary moral thing... the point of a border is to secure the welfare of the population, and whether it is open or closed should be subject to that, not emotional bullshit.
Meh, I guess I was looking at it in the context of other shitholes.
Nevertheless, any plan revolving around this fails because as much as Mexicans would admit their problems they sure as hell aren't going to have the gringos ride down like god on high and be their savior.
Good point though.
Immigration would certainly keep jobs around. Currently, all a corporation has to do is immigrate (outsource) to Mexico or some other wasteland, which would be harder to justify when everybody who needs a job has already headed for where the going's good.
I disagree, the emotional bullshit is important, because closing the border provides a very specific answer to the people who want to leave Mexico because of stuff like the murders that occured in your article. That answer, specifically, is "fuck you".
And I also think that it is a very good idea to add more people to the lower end of the class system, as that would provide upward pressure to get a college degree and move completely out of the kind of work that can be given to the vast majority of people who immigrate from Mexico.
We have an asylum system for people trying to immigrate out of fear of their safety, do we not?
As for the rest, again, I'm for whatever the math supports will improve lives. Doing things out of emotion is how horrible shit happens, like "No Irish Need Apply."
Do those lives have to be American lives?
I'm saying that rather than just accepting every goddamn refugee from every shithole country we should try to eliminate shithole countries so that there are no refugees.
I mean do you know what generally happens with Mexican immigrants? They are usually sending money back home to Mexico where they plan to return because while there is no opportunity there they still prefer to live there. In the mean time, their families are broken up for long periods of time, which I'm sure is just wonderful for the children.
Why shouldn't the US government strive it improve the lives of its own citizens first?
I mean, seriously?