My point with this thread is not to defend or decry immigration nor to idolize or demonize immigrants. I simply want to discuss this hypothesis: mass 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.
Do you think this is correct? How do you think recent developments like automation and climate change will play into this?
Ofcourse. As always, it's a symptom of misery, not a cause.
I think it would really help to improve the productive forces of poor countries, AKA proper capitalist development (as Marx would want)
Wyatt Murphy
Yeah I'd say you're mostly correct. I don't want to think about the humanitarian clusterfuck that will happen when climate change causes mass migration. There's already a few hundred thousand people displaced in India due to flooding, what will happen when their coastlines are gone?
Tyler Cox
Sure. Problem with developed countries is the population starts to demand rights, and if left unchecked that can hurt the bottom line. The way to curtail it is to replace them with an easier to manage population. All it takes is for the government to want to revert the trend. Singapore for instance managed to reduce population growth when it was too high and increase it when it was too low. Instead of increasing taxes on everyone to pay for increased costs due to Ahmed going akbar every week, give a tax cut for couples with kids and you'll see it grow again. But do we need population growth? European population has been pretty stable, being at replacement rate should be good enough unless you buy in the unlimited growth meme.
Brody Ramirez
This seems like fear mongering, no way birth rates are gonna stay that high as sub-saharan africa develops.
Cooper Gomez
Got a source for that infograph? I'm pretty sure the current trend in birth rates are that of a global decrease.
Grayson Peterson
Neoliberalism in Europa does not agree with you.
Also, "developing" countries don't have contraception, children are workers and soldiers, don't have a way of life that creates anything else to do.
The "west" is filled with contraception, children are a burden and you have too many replacments.
As "developing" countries become the "west" birthrates will fall. .. unless.. they don't because Capitalism needs cheap labor.
Hudson Gonzalez
Just because it worked in Singapore that one time doesn't mean it's going to work anywhere anytime on a politician's whim.
Dominic Barnes
The source is the title: UN World Population Prospects 2015. The data, methodology, etc is available in esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/ . If you go in graphs you can see the trend for individual countries.
David Torres
then why doesn't China having mass immigration?
Jayden Mitchell
Because working conditions are abysmal and the cultural barrier is huge.
Asher White
Because China is still half-agrarian. Only the coast is developed. The "mass immigration" is internal. Instead of participating in a market economy that wants to strangle their livelihood and prevent them from having children, people just move back to their villages to their farms.
Nevermind Tibet and Sinkiang.
Blake Peterson
What about Russia? They are an industrialized nation, no?
Ian Foster
Not for the last 26 years, no.
Jonathan Foster
It's funny. A couple of decades ago, back when the left hated Soros and protested every globalist meeting, it was a common accusation that Porky wanted their precious capital to move freely between nations, but keep the hoi-polloi away from developed countries. I wonder who was it that first figured out that mass immigration would actually help Porky.
Henry Reed
Russia is second to USA in the number of immigrants it gets, what do you mean?
Nathan Young
Not if you arrest and deport them. It's a political choice.
Jacob Martinez
1) there is a lot of labour coming in from Africa, notably Nigeria, and 2) as said the poor on the countryside migrate anually towards the populated and opportunity-filled coastal cities for work in what is called chunyun (lit. "spring move"), only spending a few weeks at home before they again return to spend a year working in the city. There are some good documentaries on this like Last Train Home.
Chuang (Chinese ultraleft publication) talk about the phenomenon in their first journal, Dead Generations: chuangcn.org/journal/one/.
Aiden Howard
RIP in pepperonis pyramid scheme that is capitalism.
Jayden Watson
How so? Africa/Middle East is as far from German, French, etc culture as it is from Chinese. You're right on working conditions though. Anyone immigrating to China would have to work harder than the Chinese do, and they work like crazy already so good fucking luck with that.
What? No, they move from the villages to the huge centers. The government even has to limit who can move there. As bad as working 36 hours a day is, they get paid more building gizmos than they would working the field, hence why people are willing to literally live in cages in Hong Kong.
Nolan Perez
And then the global market economy goes tits up.
Carson Mitchell
Speaking of which, is there a solid theory on why this happens? I know there's a strong correlation between fertility and wealth/quality of life, but is there a more precise conclusion? Is it simply the cost of rearing a child too high? Is it that a more hedonic society coaxes people into having fewer or no children? Is the refusal to reproduce a side effect of alienation?
Samuel Mitchell
Look, it's not that you're entirely wrong, but you ingested propaganda.
The "our people don't even want these jobs anymore" is a horrible, fake meme that needs to go. There's plenty of people here that look for factory or even agriculture jobs and can't find them, or only find ones with terrible pay and conditions.
Now the immigrants, they will take those jobs. They don't have a choice. But here's the kicker about immigrants: they don't know about the country they're going in, so what they do is they actually get informed about it. The result of this is that there's a bunch of foreigners that know shit your average native worker doesn't.
The moment an immigrant stop being exploitable (for example: they get papers and are not just some faceless nobodies that can't report ruthless exploitation otherwise they risk being sent back to their country), they're way more of a pain in the ass for the booj than natives.
I don't know why the bourg doesn't see this, but it happens.
Samuel Cox
No, people just breed less when they're sure their spawn won't die. The realization is delayed, though, so there's a boom every time there's improvement to quality of life.
Daniel Torres
didn't most wealthy societies experience a boom in birth rates in the past? maybe when a closed society reaches a certain point, people just feel less inclined to reproduce for a variety of reasons.
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour on the bright side, cigarette guy is in perfect shape to fight fascists. hell, the proletariat on a global scale is actually in great shape, once you get outside american and european larping
Brody Williams
They'll keep coming, they'll just be forced underground.
Lincoln Wilson
There will be no incentive for them, if they started shooting at their dingies today, tomorrow none of them will come.
Jose Diaz
>Chuang (Chinese ultraleft publication) talk about the phenomenon in their first journal, Dead Generations: chuangcn.org/journal/one/. fuck yeah
Nolan Richardson
Many people in Africa already speak French or English, Portuguese even. Besides, learning German or Italian is a much easier task than tackling fucking Chinese. Remember, it's so hard to learn the government actually had to come up with simplified characters in the '60s in order to increase literacy.
Jonathan Stewart
Are you suggesting we allow border patrol to shoot innocent people dead because they had the audacity of trying to cross a national border without the proper paperwork?
Levi Myers
Don't bite.
William White
I'm stating the fact that they only come into europe illegally on dingies because the coast guard picks them up, brings them to europe and provide them with welfare and almost non-existent sentencing.
If they shot at the dingies, this problem would be solved within a day.
Joshua Murphy
It's the right thing to do
Asher Murphy
This. They have high birth rates because they also have high infant mortality rates, due to their material conditions. It's demographics 101 tbh fam smh.
John King
Which is why the Russian birth rate is higher than the Icelandic birthrate!
Nicholas Allen
okay edgelord
Jordan Green
There is a city with three times the population of Iceland literally 100 miles away from me. Like I said, demographics 101.
Anthony Clark
yeah, 101 indeed
John Foster
/thread, we don't need to debate this or listen to various reasons for why this might not be true. It is demonstrably true, all uber porky neo-libs love immigration and its obvious that the goal is a one world market with a one world debt-currency and everyone moves around as their employers and the techno-cultural marketplace dictates. No more culture or distinctions or uniqueness or realms outside of commerce and the military.
Oliver Reed
I don't get what you are trying to prove right now tbh. I'm pretty sure it's harsher to give birth to children and keep them alive as infants in the middle of Siberia surrounded by almost inexistent roads to go the nearest hospital, or even the most sordid suburbs of Moscow, than it is in the glorified big city that is basically Iceland.
Nolan Miller
but I want this world Riiiiight, there won't be any culture whatsoever if nations weren't a thing anymore. Boohoo
Brandon Foster
When you take things out of context without thinking, you misinterpret the spirit of the text. I said "everyone moves around as their employers and the techno-cultural marketplace dictates" that's not the same thing as """""super cool people""""" trying out new places to live like in your dream sequence, you-and-your-friends travelling your whole 20's freely wherever. That's not what I meant and that's not what we are headed towards. You will go where the market and cultural forces decide you do, if you don't you will be made to do so or your will die. That's our future. Its totalitarian.
Kevin Jones
A REDUCTION IN WAGE SHARE VIA IMMIGRATION INCREASES NET PROFIT AND THIS INCREASES LIQUIDITY, RESULTING IN A REDUCTION IN INTEREST RATES WHICH WILL PROVIDE INCENTIVE FOR CONSUMER AND INVESTOR BORROWING IN THE ECONOMY EXPERIENCING IMMIGRATION FOR THE PURPOSE OF FINANCING INVESTMENT, CREATING JOBS WHEREVER THE WAGE SHARE IS LOWEST.
Aiden Kelly
...
Jace Lewis
kek, in your dreams pinnacle of modern neoliberal imperialism is labor arbitrage free movement of capital between borders but restricted movement of labor that's what IMF all about, destruction of trade barriers
if you really think that bourgs gonna repeat their mistakes again, you are retarded they remember what a pain in the ass unions were they didn't go for the Volcker shock so that later they would return power to the unions
Bentley Hughes
It's not edgy at all, in fact, not doing so has awful consequences for the people already living in those countries.
Landon Jones
This is the mentality of a 15-year old school shooter.
Jaxon Ramirez
niggers
Chase Lopez
It's worth countering the meme that there's a lack of workers in western countries.
In 1974 UK unemployment was at the unacceptably high (for post-war years) figure of 1 million, so we got this poster from the Labour party. Today unemployment stands at the lowest figure since 1975, 1.5 million, and it's not a major political issue at all. It's been completely normalized. This obscures the fact that work has become more precarious, etc, as well.
Now the UK population has grown due to immigration of course - total population growth since 1974 has been 14% - but that's a 50% jump in unemployment in the last 40 years. There's absolutely no shortage of people. If natives were simply abandoning jobs that they think they're too good to do, they wouldn't work at McDonalds on a zero hour contract. The situation is much more nuanced than that.
They bet on automatization but they still need labor power so they'll slowly increase foreign workforce but it's totally not immigration i swear on me mum.
Indeed it is. While many systemic evils in today's world are due to the Jew, international finance capitalism is the one evil that transcends him. The problem with Hollywood is that it's run by Jews, for instance, and, in principle, we could have a pro-social media establishment. The education system shows a heavy Jewish influence, it is possible, in principle, to have a good education system.
The same cannot be said for capitalism. While Jews are heavily involved in it, it would be evil even if no Jews existed on this Earth. Exploitation and dehumanization are its inherent features because profits are in indirectly proportional to wages and employment. The capitalist system, subjugating everything to the profit motive, will destroy everything that stands in its way: communities, nations, races. Though immigration, the capitalist can (1) increase his pool of consumers (doubly so if there's a welfare state that redistributes wealth from natives to immigrants, giving them buying power), (2) render the native population more desperate by driving down wages and (3) neutralize political opposition by destroying social cohesion.
These outcomes do not depend on any particular CEO being evil; if he won't pursue these goals, he will be replaced by another one who will.
As always, automation will enrich the owner class and beggar the workers even more. All we'll get will be an even smaller, even more desperate working class paying even more taxes to support the out-of-work population. This is yet another feature of the capitalist system: an increase in global GDP results in greater poverty.
The logical result of AI and 3D printing and automated factories won't be the emancipation of the population, but slavery for 99% of humanity.
Justin Evans
Not at all, my friend. We should shoot people who try to cross the national border. I don't care what paperwork they have.
Colton Ramirez
Because they were for whatever they thought would help the third world to the greatest degree. They opposed globalization because they thought it would hurt the third world, now they're supportive of it because immigration can help third worlders. For most of these people left-wing thought amounts to a desire to care for third-worlders and little else.
Zachary Hill
...
Austin Young
edgy
Hunter Jackson
Well that's part of what I said but yeah. It reminds me how liberal and neoliberal types treat mass migration policies as some sort of passive charities. Like giving a thumbs up to letting in a minuscule fraction of the world's poor have a taste of the first world, while they will never come in contact with them and won't have to lift a finger. Another form of virtue-signalling.
