My point with this thread is not to justify or defend immigration nor to idolize or fetishize immigrants. I simply want to discuss this hypothesis: immigration to developed countries is inevitable in a world of global inequality.
Birth rates in developed countries are decreasing (thanks to education, urbanization, family planning, lack of economic necessity, etc) and this trend is not going to revert. This results in an aging population and a shrinking workforce. Moreover, natives naturally abandon low-skilled jobs in favor of more comfortable or rewarding careers as they become more educated. That is when immigrants, looking for better prospects than what they can find in their home country, come in: They fill in the void that natives left behind. This pleases the capitalist who gets to hire mostly non-union workers who accept lower wages and worse conditions, and to which the solidarity of natives is unlikely to extend because of easily exacerbated ethnic tensions.
This phenomenon isn't new: the same happened in France straight from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution with succeeding waves of immigration (from Belgium, Italy, Germany, Poland, Algeria, etc) who all fulfilled that role — and similarly suffered from disadvantageous economic conditions and aggressive xenophobia.
Even the right-wing government of a country as historically hostile to immigration as Japan is increasingly reliant on migrant workers (from China, Brazil, Iran, etc) to deal with their demographic shift and labor shortage.
Labor shortages will soon evaporate due to automation. The real reason immigration is inevitable is because climate change will soon render many areas of the world unsuited for human life and thereby cause mass migration. Something which we will absolutely fail to deal with, if the current situation is any indication.
Julian Murphy
Are there any projections as to the extent of these future climatic migrations?
Caleb Nelson
Growth for the sake of growth (sometimes termed "autistic economics") is the seed, the genesis, the toxic meme of neoliberalism.
Right now, the demographic decline of developed nations does exert a cost on the economy, as fewer workers are forced to support more retirees, but it is a cost well within the limits of the enormous amounts of wealth generated by these economies' productivity. After the retirees have died? The population will neither shrink, nor grow, significantly, and we will achieve equilibrium.
For an example of how manageable this temporary problem is, the EU is currently spending only about 13% of GDP on pensions, a percentage projected to rise by no more than 10 points under the harshest estimates. Another fairy tale commonly told by neolibs is of how Japan is set to go extinct without fresh blood because young NEETs are becoming celibate hermits, in spite of the fact that Japan's population growth is identical to the USA's if US immigration since the 1965 quota explosion is subtracted, yet nobody other than Holla Forumsacks ;-) circulates similar alarmism about white Americans being sexless monks.
By contrast, if we use immigrants from undeveloped nations to retard the demographic correction of developed nations, we create an even greater catastrophe down the line. Even worse, if such immigration is massive enough, not only will it spoil demographic correction in the developed world, but decreasing population pressure in the developing world might spike the slowdown already occurring in there.
In summary, overpopulation is bad, it will fix itself quite safely even if we do nothing, and mass economic immigration could seriously fuck it up.
Carter Russell
A few more illustrations, on global population/fertility projections, and on the tremendous population density of Japan (caused both by its isolation, and the unexploitable ruggedness of most of its terrain).
Thomas Sullivan
Haven't seen any, but we do know that a bunch of countries such as Bangladesh will be underwater if the sea levels rise just a few meters. Already there we're talking tens of millions of refugees.
Benjamin Williams
They will be kept out by force, because it would be impossible to let them in without causing the collapse of first-world countries.
The current situation (which is insignificant in comparison to what will come) is causing a rapid hardening of attitudes to refugees, even among the elites who badly want more immigrants. By the time the real migrations begin, the first world will be very quick to do what is necessary to keep people out. That means walls, sea patrols, deportation forces, internment camps. It's going to be ugly.
Michael Torres
Depends.
If we're talking Porky here, yes it's inevitable and you better get used to it. Western and Northern Europe absolutely depend on immigration for their economic growth, because population increase is the only way it can grow at all (not counting some imperialistic outbreak, but that's unlikely any time soon). You can make the case for a stationary economy and population, but I hardly need to point out why Porky ain't down with that.
Which is not to say all migrants will get in. So far Porky can gladly cope, but even he can only accomodate so many. So if we see truly massive migrations caused by climate change, we'll get
This argument has been around since the start of industrialization. It's false, because capitalism (or just plain human industry and necessity) creates new markets which need human labor because they can't yet be automatized. Or to put it in a more cynical way: Porky will never let proles go unexploited. The automatic loom didn't kill the proletariat, it merely drove them to be exploited by different industries.
Elijah Stewart
What this poster is referring to is Jevons' Paradox. It's also why environmentalism is a hopeless venture under capitalism in spite of massive increases in the efficiency of resource consumption.
Jacob Adams
What if fertility remains or falls under the replacement rate?
I can see why, but isn't inevitable that people from poorer countries will try and emigrate to richer countries as opportunities for them open up there?
Logan Ward
Why would that be, exactly?
Elijah Baker
I firmly believe in the need for population control under socialism. Incentives for sterilisation and a cap at a maximum 2.1 fertility rate are needed ASAP.
Hudson Walker
The global trend is already that of declining birth rates. The worldwide total fertility rate was around 5 in 1950 and is now inferior to 2.5 — there is no need for any artificial "capping" to be enforced. It's certainly not worth the reintroduction of eugenics in public discourse and policies.
Isaiah Barnes
We're talking a gigantic number of people, penniless, mostly without skills, who would need to be housed and supported by the welfare state. It isn't possible and even if it was, there would be no appetite for it. Look at the way Europe has reacted to a million refugees and imagine what would happen with a hundred million.
Elijah Nguyen
Then either population pressure is still too high for comfort, and it will stabilize at a lower level; or much of humanity has somehow gone completely insane and lost the instict to live, in which case they will die off and be replaced by fitter specimens.
If they're allowed to, instead of being encouraged (and helped) to enrich their own broken countries? Yes, which is why they must be stopped.
This. See the graphs in my earlier posts, we're already predicted to plateau at ~11 billion circa 2100, possibly as low and fast as 8.4 billion in 2050.
David Gutierrez
I think this is a key detail that isn't grasped enough. The system that pushes people from poor countries towards migrant-starved rich countries is also responsible for the original countries being poor in the first place. This whole migrant flux would cease if those countries became developed, not to mention you would then have all the countries involved starving for migrants. Porky has a very real interest in keeping not only his countries rich, but other countries poor. That's in addition to, of course, the "exploitation totem pole" that capitalism always had.
David Sanchez
National boundaries exist only to protect the power and property rights of the bourgeoisie. Dismantling that power and those "rights" would inevitably destroy the largest root cause of exploitation and instability outside the Developed/1st World and thus the majority of immigration would stop.
Also people that say that immigrants aren't helpful to the cause of socialism are either ignorant or Holla Forums and don't know their labor history.
Noah Brown
National boundaries exist only to enforce the laws promulgated by those nations' governments. The 1st world is "developed" from its once-identical-to-the-3rd-world state primarily because of those hard-won laws, while the 3rd world remains undeveloped primarily because they are lawless and corrupt, creating an ideal environment for the arbitrary ruthlessness capitalism loves.
By dissolving borders under capitalism, you only strengthen it, and weaken the forces that oppose it.
Hunter Harris
This used to be true. It isn't anymore. The relationship between productivity increase and job creation ceased around the year 2000.
Technological change has reached such speed and efficiency that less jobs are created than are eliminated. That's why we have such things as "jobless recoveries". Moreover, most workers can't keep up with the educational requirements of much higher-skilled jobs anyway.
The loom didn't kill the proletariat because it still relied on a significant amount of human labor and was confined to the textile industry. Modern technological development like artificial intelligence, advanced robotics and big data on the other hand are increasingly self-sufficient and versatile — a clever enough innovation can become a threat to a vast amount of even skilled jobs from a wide array of different industries overnight.
But is it even possible to mend that global inequality under capitalism? How do you "encourage" someone to remain destitute when he knows better prospects might be available to him if only he could make it to Europe or the US — legality and dangerosity of such a journey be damned?
Jacob Edwards
I was going to meme at you, but I'll try and be polite.
And who runs those governments? The bourgeois.
wew lad The first world progressed into its current state because of intense political and economic exploitation of the "3rd world," from which was extracted all kinds of raw materials, valuable ore, and both economic and intellectual capital. It's no coincidence that London, England–the same place from which at one time one quarter of the whole planet was administered–is still the global capital of banking today.
wew lad The 3rd world remains "undeveloped" because of the continuing exploitation and economic policies maintained by their former colonial oppressors. Post independence, Latin America suffered first under their racialist, quasi-aristocratic native rulers, and then had to endure centuries of political oppression and instability as they cast them out, only for the United States to overthrow their new governments and reinstall similarly oppressive military juntas that similarly exploited their countries for the benefit of Western business. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d'état en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion
Borders mean fuck all to modern capital, and only exist to safeguard private property and the governments that defend them. By truly eliminating borders and the logic that makes them possible, principally the enforcement of property rights, the entire system of capital that makes such things as borders, border enforcement, and the capital exploitation that necessitates immigration and "foreigners" to "keep out" comes crashing down.
Brandon Carter
Look to history. For instance, the Europe that was once hemorrhaging endless swarms of starved peasants to the US up until the World Wars completely altered their politics and economies.
The idea that the 1st world is and always has been dependent on imperial exploitation, especially that this has ever been of any benefit to their populations, is a farce enforced jointly between neoliberal capitalists and their deluded postmodernist stooges.
Up until organized labor closed the international floodgates of goods and bodies to imperial capitalism in the gilded age, life for the average citizen at the heart of any "great" colonial power was as brutally miserable as at any of its furthest corners, while the local dignitaries of any "subject" lived as much like the kings they were as in the distant capitals that ruled them, and private transnationals like the East India and Hudson Bay companies slithered freely between them.
That holds as true today as it did a century ago, with the opening of borders to transnational capitalism once again restoring the iron grip of oppression to labor's throat worldwide.
Same problem, same solution: Kill laissez-faire.
Alexander Powell
I'm not sure how this relates to my question — or maybe I'm just missing the point. Could you be a bit more specific?
Christopher Morales
I don't know man, I'm pretty sure that when all jobs on Earth are automatized, Porky will still gladly offer you a job mining asteroids with a fatality rate of 50% (you must supply your own spacesuit).
This current job creation slump might be temporary.
WEW LAD
Honestly, I think that eliminating borders under a capitalist order would be a terrible idea, if only because just about anything done under capitalism is a terrible idea. Unless coupled with economic/material equality, it will end up a mess.
Adrian Thomas
Eh, we can just go full Stalin, lock them in their countries and let them starve.
Jace Gutierrez
Not if we find a way to redistribute wealth in one way or another. Be it the social-democratic solution of shorter working hours, a universal basic income and increasingly progressive taxation — or the socialist solution of seizing the means of production.
