Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Immigration, capitalism and illegal immigration

As I promised, no more election punditry. Today and tomorrow RL economy posts, then back to games. Yes, these economy posts resonate to the program of President Trump, but they are valuable on their own too. Probably I'd never come up with them without having to explain myself why do I support an anti-free-trade candidate, but I'm glad I did.

A year ago I celebrated the immigration as the end of the social democracy. My logic was simple: if we accept that certain social standards are human rights then we must give them to every human who happens to turn up in our lands. As it's impossible, the rich countries will be forced to shut down social transfers as the working people simply can't produce enough to support the welfare "rights" of everyone on the planet. So immigrants can enter and make their fortune but they receive no welfare, equally to locals. Everyone, regardless of color, religion or gender must provide for himself trough work or find an individual who support him for personal reasons.

The above view was naive. The reason is that I missed a third option: illegal, but openly tolerated immigration. People who are practically allowed to immigrate, but legally not. So they can work but have no rights - the textbook definition of slavery. Such version helps the rich who contempt the law at the expense of the poor and the rich who follow the law. A law-abiding business is not competitive with one running on slave-work. The household that employs house slaves (illegal immigrant gardener working for pennies) enjoys higher living standard than the one which pays workers or where the family has to do the chores. Please note that the famous tickle-down economy doesn't happen mostly because of illegals: even if you are a millionaire who could afford citizen service providers, why bother if Margarita does your chores for half price.

It's not just about money. And if it comes to millionaires, it's absolutely not about the money. Citizen workers don't just have higher salary expectation (and minimal wage that they can't even forfeit). They have rights and they know their rights. If you come home drunk and improperly touch Margarita, next day you give her a $50 bill and an apology. A citizen worker would give you a lawsuit for $100K punitive damages on top of criminal charges and tarnishing your reputation. Don't get me wrong, I do agree that it's warranted. But people can get away from the rights of workers by employing illegals. Now that's flat out slavery.

Huge waves of illegal immigrants were invited by the liberals but were given no rights. They didn't give out citizenship, they didn't even try to do that. The liberals - paid by crony capitalists like Soros - didn't want to include other people, they wanted to enslave them. I want to return to the two lawful solutions. The decision is moral, and I'm still for #1. But I would take #2 any day of the week over slavery and its consequences: high crime and unemployment of the citizen workers:
  1. Full citizenship and equal rights for everyone who is inside. This will mean very low social transfers as it's impossible for the current GDP to support so many people on the current living standards.
  2. Build the wall, deport all the illegals

Note: I'm fully aware that the World is not black and white and there is huge difference between a half-illiterate young Mexican who doesn't speak English and a South-East Asian immigrant whose citizenship request was not processed for a decade and does a highly qualified job, but the point stays: give them full citizenship or deport them!

Finally a little note: have you ever wondered why Enrique Peña Nieto invited Donald Trump when he "had no chance to win" and the visit brought nothing but criticism to the Mexican president? Because there is one thing worse than a Mexican "bringing drugs, bringing crime, are rapists" steals your job: being the Mexican in a foreign country without rights, doing lowly jobs. There is no other explanation for the invitation than trying to help Trump to look presidential and serious, to help him win, because "the Wall" would help Mexico much more than it would help the USA.


PS: great example how detached the media is from the productive people.

17 comments:

Yaggle said...

I always felt the worst criminals were not illegal immigrants working in the U.S.A., it was the people who hire the illegals, paying them less and treating them worse in order to help themselves. I think it would be cheaper to prosecute and fine/jail those people than deport illegals and build a wall and the illegals would leave then since nobody would hire them. I do not think it is just liberal politicians who invite them but don't give them rights. I believe it is conservatives also who help businessmen who donated to them, and say them will do something about illegal immigration but once elected, never do. It is similar to how liberals say they will do something about gun violence, and conservatives say that liberals want to take everybody's guns. It is only a system where both of them can continue getting votes and taking people's donations. Or like Israel can keep getting money and weapons from U.S.A. and Palestinians can keep getting money from worldwide sympathizers to their plight. Why should anything be fixed and all the free money disappear? Why would Al-Qaeda or ISIL person want to work a back-breaking job their whole life when they can get funding and spend their lives shooting their AK-47 and blowing things up?

Unknown said...

Spot on analyze. People forget that there is only one proper way to run any country. Romans nailed it, hence phrase "Dura lex, sed lex".

The whole drama in Europe/USA, with immigrants, economy, elections and many more things, comes from disrespect for the laws. Racisms or hatred can only be stopped by rationality. Like any other form of irrationality.

Smokeman said...

You just figured out immigration.

The liberals never will. They think the text on the Statue of Liberty about bringing us your huddled masses and what not is about enlightening mankind... It's not. It's about slavery.

In the beginning, we brought over Africans as farm workers. Actual slaves that could be bought and sold. That did not end well. But it ended "actual" slavery.

Then we needed railroads. So we brought in anyone who would agree to the totally one sided "contract." Still slavery, yo.

Then we needed workers for the manufacturing age. Same thing.

Then we needed the Mexican Branceros to harvest crops. Too bad Mexican crops rotted in the fields because there was no one to harvest them. Pro tip! Mexicans have crops, too.

Then we needed Indian IT workers. Same drill.

Then we needed Pakistani meat plant workers. Same drill.

Immigration is a lie. It's all about cheap labor. Just say no to it.

Anonymous said...

"This will mean very low social transfers as it's impossible for the current GDP to support so many people on the current living standards."

This is otherwise known as "We are pretending to be richer than we are, and we cannot afford to pay people enough to buy food".

The people are already in the country. They are already living there to some standard. I do not think the USA is about to run out of money...if it is, then they have far bigger problems than Trump

Gevlon said...

@Anon: THESE people are already in. But as long as immigration is possible more will come. The USA could give welfare to the current 11M. But it couldn't give to the rest of the impoverished Middle and South-Americans hoping for the "American Dream".

Unknown said...

Actually the Chinese economy is built on that principle. Migrant workers come from the rural provinces to work in the cities. They have no rights. They cannot get state education for their children for example except in their home province. So the children stay with their grandparents while the parents head off to the industrial areas and build iPhones.

Unknown said...

Nailed it, Gevlon!
From a personal POV, I cannot understand some of my country's parties who are against an immigration law based on Canadian immigration system. Apply for immigration, show your qualification, take a language test and if you pass, welcome, if not, sorry, mate, try harder next season...
Another very important reason for xenophobia is that fact that the current immigration processes in European countries restrict immigrants from working. Required certificates are widely not acknowledged, making it difficult to impossible for even qualified people to apply for jobs that meet their qualification. In consequence, immigrants mostly remain poor compared to average natives and this often results in a higher crime rate.
The equation: more immigrante = more crime is still a valid argument for all those who oppose open immigration laws.

Another reason is the fact that too often, immigrante will live in "parallel cultures" with their own rules and far removed from the society they actually live in. While there are many reasons as to why such things happen, it is most important to deal with it in a rational and straight way. No tolerance for parallel cultures that ignore native laws and authorities. If someone wants to live by sharia law, for example, move to an islamic state where this system is valid.

In no way can ther ebe tolerance to an entity who challenges official authority!


Unknown said...

Even legal immigration is harmful to at least some locals.

Liberals love the immigrants, cause Jose will not be applying for a job in the newspaper. He will not apply for a job as a teacher, lawyer, doctor, or even a librarian. No, Jose will go work in construction, plumbing, gardening or any other service that the middle class use all the time. He will compete on the job market with the poor locals, and having lower expectations will work for less. The wages will drop until they equate that of Jose's home country (adjusted for costs of living), so the effect of immigration is lowering living standards for the poor locals (to the point of equating them with immigration source countries).

The liberals however are middle and higher middle class. They will increase their standards of living, because the people working for them (like cleaning their offices and making their coffees) are now making less, cutting down costs of those services. They are safe in their jobs, which require either higher education, perfect language skills or a number of certificates.
The same liberals will then protest against having their jobs outsourced to cheaper countries. A mexican moving in and taking their neighobur's job in construction is "progressive", Microsoft moving their research centre to India is "treason" and "heartless capitalism".
Oh, and they never live in the proximity of all those lawless immigrants, so they don't care about the crime increase either.

This is why minimum wage is important. In countries with little to no immigration it is harmful, as it prevents low skilled people from working (think about all those people with iq under 85 - no emplyer can pay them more than their work is worth. Same with teenagers), but in countries with lots of immigration it has to be adhered to religiously.

To combat this you either lock down the immigration entirely or make sure the immigrants a representative of all income brackets. Australia does something like that if I remember correctly.

Phelps said...

There is a major quirk of US illegal immigration that you have missed -- we give welfare to illegals already. I'll give you a second to wrap your mind around that, because the rank insanity makes it hard to swallow all at once. The mechanism is the American quirk of anchor babies. Sneak in, pop out a kid, and then collect welfare on the kid while you live here illegally. Birthright citizenship is the achilles heel of America (and I for one support a constitutional amendment to end it.)

The reason there is a division of #1 vs #2 is that most of the illegals come from socialist hellholes, who came here because it wasn't a hellhole, but don't seem to grasp that it was socialism that made it a hellhole in the first place. So, when they come here, they want to vote for socialism. That means that the democrats (pro-socialism) want to make them citizens to farm their votes (option #1) while the republicans (anti-socialism) want to send them out before they vote in even more socialism.

Smokeman said...

Anon at 15 November, 2016 07:34:

"The people are already in the country. They are already living there to some standard. I do not think the USA is about to run out of money...if it is, then they have far bigger problems than Trump"

The country is 20 trillion in debt and routinely spends more than it bring in. What is your definition of "run out of money?"

We also have a jobs shortage for middle class workers as we've shipped those jobs overseas.

We need to stop taking advantage of the world's children and take care of our own. Congress needs a massive enema to eject the elites and bring our manufacturing back home as part of a balanced trade platform and we need a complete rewrite of our absurd income tax system... brought to us, by the way, by the elites in 1913.

Hanura H'arasch said...

"2. Build the wall, deport all the illegals"

But how? A wall, besides being ridiculously expensive, won't keep out illegal aliens that overstay their visas. Deporting them would be simple ... except you have to find them first. I don't see how either of those problems could be solved without spending massive amounts of money and/or giving up basic freedoms.

Gevlon said...

@Hanura: stop and frisk. Policemen stop people on the streets and ask for papers.

Unknown said...

@Smokeman
"Congress needs (to) bring our manufacturing back home as part of a balanced trade platform"

This is not going to happen. Outside production is cheaper than in US, any company which ignores this fact will go bust. You can't fight evolution.

The only thing that can happen is US production costs going down or China going up. US needs to get poorer or the rest of the world more affluent. Not exactly all the way to parity, but at least to the point where transporting goods for 10k miles won't be profitable anymore.
Taxes and tariffs can make foreign products more expensive, but they also make exports less profitable. What's more, taxes and tariffs will kill lots of jobs, exactly the problem they're trying to solve.

Alternatively abolish income taxes and corporate taxes, entirely. This will make production in US cheaper and bring the jobs back.

Smokeman said...

Gevlon said...
"@Hanura: stop and frisk. Policemen stop people on the streets and ask for papers."

This is part of the "giving up basic freedoms" that both sides of the aisle flop around about, calling it a problem.

Well, it is a problem. But it's also a logical conclusion to a Hegelian dialectic started by short sighted fools (I'll call them "liberals", also referred to as "Useful idiots.") Here's how it works: The useful idiots wax poetic about people in other countries not having it as nice as they do, so they use government to grease the skids of immigration and amnesty for illegals. This creates a huge population of people outside of the cultural norm. At the same time, the people in control, the "Elites" see this for what it is and get behind the useful idiots as they can use these new "second class citizens" both for cheap labor and to destroy the value of labor in the general population (This lines their pockets.) Crime rises as people who feel disenfranchised turn to gangs and drugs and the Police State (tm) rises as a for profit (With political power being the currency.) solution through dubious mechanics like "Terry Stops" (Literally, stop and frisk people profiled as high risk.) and the practice of procedurally routine warrants checks on every interaction with law enforcement. This wide (and morally dubious) net finds the criminals and illegals for the system to process.

The only way to stop this from spiraling into the "Judge Dredd Future" (Where EVERY transaction,even financial ones, results in a "papers, please" moment.) is to clamp immigration and "second hand citizen sub societies", deport current illegals, and temporarily double down on the police State until the more "dubious components of the second class society" are jailed, deported, or integrated into the general society. Of course, this is a very slippery slope.

It's a dumb game. One we were all better off not playing in the first place. "Caring" is great, but "Caring" without "Rule of Law" is societal suicide through the mechanics of the Hegelian dialectic.

Anonymous said...

@Hanura
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Verify

Hanura H'arasch said...

@Gevlon: Assuming you order half the police force to do just that, about ~500k officers, each of them would have to frisk about 640 people to match the US population. Except people would get frisked twice or trice, while others wouldn't at all. It also has to be done undercover, or people will simply avoid police like the plague.

I don't know, I'll believe that it works when it's actually tried and I see the results.

@Anonymous: E-Verify only helps to prevent accidental hiring of illegals. If employers don't register illegals in the system it doesn't work.

Smokeman said...

Slawomir Chmielewski said...

"This is not going to happen. Outside production is cheaper than in US, any company wich ignores this fact will go bust. You can't fight evolution."

No. but you can prevent illegally manufactured goods from entering the US. If you're an American manufacturer wanting to sell goods in the US, Congress can make it so those goods have to be made (mostly) in the US. Would there be a black market? Oh hell yes! But the added cost of that route would prevent it from becoming mainstream.

You can't raise the production costs of overseas manufacturing to anywhere within parity of the US, there are simply too many people there who would do the work cheaper. Your choice is America first, or the entire world goes third world. At best, some position between third world and second world. There isn't enough extractable energy to do otherwise.

There is no "kumbayah" future where everyone is in the first world. The third world can do something the first world cannot possibly compete with... make unlimited numbers of expendable workers. You can't apply any semblance of "Free market principles" to that.

Is the current system reformable? I don't know. We probably really are heading for the "Judge Dredd Future (tm)" in an unstoppable path that ends when a handful of mega corps run the entire planet.