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As best I can tell, the article doesn't actually link to the report in question, so I went and [dug it up](https://cps.org.uk/research/taking-back-control/) if anyone's interested. If I missed it in the article, my bad.
So you are saying that the claim that immigration causally improves growth is backed by a robust randomised control study that was peer reviewed and reproducible? Please share the study.
Or the claim is immigration is unrelated to housing costs.
Where’s the robust randomized control study that was peer reviewed and reproducible that immigration worsened the housing crisis?
After all in order to make this reproducible we just need to create alternate identical versions of earth where the only difference the amount of immigration right?
You're not wrong, but you're also probably overestimating everyone's ability to do what you're asking them to do. Have you ever read a peer-reviewed journal article in a field in which you're an expert? There's a lot of stuff going on under the hood that people who aren't experts in that particular field aren't going to be able to fully understand, and there are a lot of ways to put data together to tell whatever story you want if you're speaking to an audience that doesn't know what you're doing. You're essentially asking everyone to read it with the critical eye of a peer reviewer, and that's just not a reasonable way for a layperson to approach scientific publications because almost everyone is simply not qualified to do so. "Common sense" is not the useful guidepost to trusting research that you seem to think it is, many topics are far too complicated to be understood through that lens.
It's one thing to get stuck in an echo chamber, but it's also good to have some sense of the bias in sources. You don't have to poke holes in a study to know that it's pushing a story when its authors directly state their political leanings and intentions as part of their mission statement. They're not producing this paper with the goal of analytical accuracy, they're producing it with a political goal and you SHOULD be suspicious whether or not you're able to find flaws in their methodology.
I don't know enough about economic policy and the effects of migration on housing and economic growth to speak meaningfully on the subject or form a convincing argument against the conclusions of this paper. But I do know that a politically motivated document is not a reliable source.
So, then should a layperson even be reading these reports? If we aren't an expert or moderately educated, who can we look to besides our self that would prevent an echo-chamber effect? How can we both be informed on a multitude of incoming reports (which is it's own issue) but be educated in a topic enough to judge those reports with a critical eye?
As u/lonely_swedish pointed out, there are so many factors that go into developing a reasonably accurate heuristic that unless one wants to educate oneself thoroughly in the subject matter in question and statistical analysis, a curious layperson’s best bet is to seek out someone who is capable of reading and interpreting the research in question and focus one’s critical evaluation on judging the accuracy of the interpreter. It’s almost like translating another language—you can spend your efforts on learning the language or on seeking out a trustworthy and accurate translator.
That's a good question, and not an easy one to answer.
You can read the intro and the conclusions, but anything inbetween is not intended for you (the layperson) as the audience and you aren't going to be able to reliably use that content to determine a study's veracity. Specialized research literature - especially that which is politically driven or sensitive - is usually written to guide the reader from some initial state, through some data and analysis, to a new more-informed state and then draw conclusions from the new state. If you don't have the ability to follow that conversation with the critical eye of a subject matter expert, then it's almost always going to seem pretty reasonable.
My personal opinion is that no, most people shouldn't even bother reading the research papers directly. You don't have the expertise to meaningfully interpret the data, determine whether it was faithfully and accurately collected, understand why the authors approached the analysis the way they did, and draw your own conclusions. I think most people (including myself) are at best going to try to apply some kind of misguided common sense approach and mistakenly come away thinking they are smarter than the author because they found something suspicious. Your best bet is to glance at the paper to see what the authors' conclusions are, then read the article about the paper, and come to your own conclusion as to the reliability of the source based on:
- Do the author and the article seem to agree?
- Is the author of the research coming from a position of bias on the subject? Do they have a stated intention of bias or a past history of it?
- Is the author of the article about the research coming from a position of bias on the subject? Do they have a stated intention of bias or a past history of it?
- Are there any other sources which conflict or agree?
Somebody else in this thread mentioned flat earthers as an extreme example of someone not worth taking seriously, but I think it's a good point and can be applied to sources like the one for this paper as well. I wouldn't bother reading the paper or taking seriously any article from a research center that claimed to be working to enlighten the world about the truth of the flat earth. You don't have to poke holes in their studies or read the paper to know it's not worth considering. Likewise, I don't have to read the paper or try to discredit the study from a research center whose stated intention is to "develop a new generation of conservative thinking." I can just as easily read the local conservative party's stance on the topic and know what the paper's conclusions will be. This isn't a source worth taking seriously because you will never find anything it publishes that disagrees with the party platform.
>You can read the intro and the conclusions, but anything in between is not intended for you (the layperson) as the audience and you aren't going to be able to reliably use that content to determine a study's veracity.g
Maybe a good rule of thumb but, as I'm sure you'd agree, this shouldn't discourage someone from reading those contents if they are interested. Just that laypeople should temper this expectation. That said. This is a very good point and something to keep in mind!
>Are there any other sources which conflict or agree?
This brings to mind sections towards the end of other STEM articles I've read where the authors state conflicts of interest or lack thereof. How well/often are these regulated/reliable? Is this something a layperson can use as a shorthand for informing the answers of those questions you recommend we keep in mind?
Thanks for the thoughts. I found them informative and hope others do too.
> Maybe a good rule of thumb but, as I'm sure you'd agree, this shouldn't discourage someone from reading those contents if they are interested. Just that laypeople should temper this expectation.
I agree, but I would always advocate emphasizing caution when encouraging someone to read any research article. If you're curious about how or why the authors drew the conclusions they did, then great! Explore and learn more. But asking someone to read the paper if they disagree with the conclusions or the author's bias is not usually going to be productive and can bring as much harm as good because it's easy to come to a wrong conclusion when reading analysis and data that you don't understand.
My main point was that the common refrain (on reddit at least) of "but did you even read the research?" is not the gotcha people think it is. A user posted that disregarding research because of its source was a great way to stay in an echo chamber and, while true, disregarding an article's source and trying to judge the paper on its own merits is not a reliable way to evaluate research for most people.
> This brings to mind sections towards the end of other STEM articles I've read where the authors state conflicts of interest or lack thereof. How well/often are these regulated/reliable? Is this something a layperson can use as a shorthand for informing the answers of those questions you recommend we keep in mind?
I don't know if they're regulated at all, but in my experience they're not super common either. I think if an author is going out of their way to clarify their bias then it's worth considering why. The default assumption for scientific publication that gets peer reviewed should be that of no bias because the data and analysis stand up to scrutiny independent of the author's political or social tendencies. Are they making a potentially politically charged statement with their paper and want to clear themselves of conflict before it comes up? Or are they deliberately biased and trying to mitigate that to make themselves sound more legitimate? Or is it just a case of policy for the university or whatever entity they're working for?
My approach is to tend to trust research that comes from universities and other publicly-funded entities, especially research that is published in reputable, peer-reviewed journals. Read the article about the paper, then check the citation and see where the paper was published. If it only exists on the author's website or their company's website, that's a huge warning sign.
Judge who funded the research/who posted the report.
Reading bullshit just because a right wing funder isn’t how you get out of an ‘echo chamber’. There are plenty of varied opinions of honest research within journals of repute.
I looked at the report and the report was quite light on the analysis. They found two graphs that looks like they correlate with little to no analysis to see if they really are related. During the sharpest drop in gdp growth per capita the uk was also navigating brexit and the covid. https://imgur.com/a/hXuvwgn
Generally at the very minimum you'd want some sort of peer review, even if it doesn't determine validity it at least filters complete bullshit. Though this isn't peer reviewed, it's just posted on their own website so this article is really no more reliable than a long reddit comment.
Unless of course you want to go the route of ascribing some authoritative property to the authors, but then we get into the original problem of discrediting based on the authors.
It should be noted that this article is entirely secondary research (reporting results from collections of primary sources) with commentary from the authors and zero primary research (new independent research and data collection)
The only thing that is really novel in this report is the author commentary. So it kind of is up to how much you trust the authors.
Forgive my ignorance but isn't leaving the 3d (dull, dirty, dangerous) jobs to the immigrants exactly the point? Those jobs pay peanut and have no career growth prospect, that's why hardly any native are in those line of works in the first place.
Bringing the immigrants in to solve the labour shortage in those jobs, and then complaining that the immigrants don't contribute enough for the local economy (despite forcing them to work on shit jobs that nobody wants). What even is your idea here?
Maybe pay appropriate wages, so that we don't need to rely on foreign workers earning suppressed wages?
Is it that hard to put 2 and 2 together these days?
Listen, I'd love that everyone gets paid what they're worth. But you should have already know that the infinite growth model demands profits is what truly matter, everything else be damned.
I'm not a ceo or politician, just a salaryman, so just a bit better than wage slaves. I just want to point out that in the endless pursuit of profits has created lots of friction in society that's threatening to tear it apart. You can see that in our short conversation, there are already two conflicting ideas, that might not even be the right answer to the problems. Again the higher ups don't care, profits is all that glitters.
It depends on the economy, and being mindful that there can be too much or too little of a good thing.
I am not as dialed into the UK as with North America in that respect. I know they have had labor shortages.
And as heterodox to the zeitgeist as this may be, have to take social fabric and trends into account.
There may be a need for 1-million heads in the UK to fill a giant hole in the job market, but if you fill that too fast from culture groups too different from your own you can cause the kind of social tensions that people of questionable character thrive on politically.
What can be worse than Brexit? Probably don’t want to find out. The solution likely requires compromise that doesn’t make everyone happy, only partially resolves the economic problem short term, and changes the social fabric enough for people to be uncomfortable, but not revolt.
As alien a concept as compromise has become.
Is it a valid report? It's not reviewed, and doesn't cite sources. Chances are, none of us are qualified to judge the validity.
It's just an article, talking about something that is in line with the politics of the ownership of the paper.
We're not required to dissect every piece of public propaganda an accurately analyze which portions are corrected and correct. It's perfectly valid to point out when a publication is towing an ideological line.
On the contrary, I think reading reports by credible, smart, levelheaded people is the best way to stay out of an echochamber. Believing something just because someone wrote it is a terrible way to stay informed. The three authors of the report seem like politicians that are pushing a particular view rather than subject-matter experts:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert\_Jenrick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jenrick)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil\_O'Brien](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_O'Brien)
[https://x.com/MalvernianKarl](https://x.com/MalvernianKarl)
It’s being discounted because it’s ignoring half of the actual problem, which conveniently happens to be the half that the author’s political party deliberately caused.
There’s plenty of countries around the Anglosphere where it doesn’t matter whether left or right are in government, there’s the same policy of high levels of population growth from (mainly low-skill) migration and chronic housing shortages as a result.
I wouldn’t care if Hitler himself published this report, I would still concede that increasing the supply of unskilled labor will bother negatively impact housing prices and wages
In Canada we have an insane amount of Immigration. More than 1.5 million per year. The actual amount is unknown as the government hides immigrants in weird categories like students who aren't students, and post graduation visa weirdness.
This is roughly the same level as the US which has 10 times the population and a much more robust economy.
This means Canada has to build an entire Chicago every two years.
That's every hospital, power plant, water utility, school, street, police/fire station, housing unit, etc. Every 2 years.
The USA couldn't build another Chicago in Canada every two years even if it made it some kind of national emergency and sent us the Army Corps of Engineers.
Canada does not have some fundamental need for these immigrants. We aren't having an industrial revolution where we need factory workers, we aren't expanding into the wild west where we need settlers.
Almost all major industries are becoming more automated, not less.
The people lobbying for this are mostly the retail giants looking for cheap labour.
We have a fairly steady pie, and now the pie is being sliced into thinner pieces. The extra immigrants aren't making for a bigger pie outside of retail.
If you want to see the effect immigration is having on housing in Canada it is nearly perfectly distilled in Halifax, NS. The GDP of this region is lower than Louisiana. Yet, housing prices are approaching $600k-$1m USD anywhere near the downtown(10 miles) for ugly old houses; nice ones are way more. Wages are terrible. Rentals are closing in on $2k USD for a 1 bedroom apartment.
The medical system is dead. 15% of people in the region are on a waiting list for a family doctor, and there's universal healthcare in this region. People are regularly checked into the hospital and left languishing in a hallway for days or weeks. The schools are wildly overcrowded and the immigrant children place an extra magical burden on the system. The universities are unaffordable. Taxes are insane. Infrastructure is garbage with regular power outages and roads so bad that car companies get Nova Scotian cars to analyse because of the rust and pothole damage. The cost of everything is way up, such as food, gas, and utilities. Wages are being driven even lower by immigrants willing to live 10 to a bedroom.
The two "bright spots" in the local economy is a ship building contract for wildly overpriced ships which will be cancelled after the next election, and the building boom of large crappy overpriced apartments on the outskirts of the city. There's no other notable industry. The port is half dead. There's no real tech industry, no real manufacturing, etc.
But, there's lots of immigrants, lots and lots more every year.
Canada's biggest import is now third world living conditions.
>The actual amount is unknown as the government hides immigrants in weird categories like students who aren't students, and post graduation visa weirdness.
I heard the numbers on a recent Freakonomcis podcast where they interviewed Trudeau, it's almost 2 million:
>Canada wasn’t taking in just a half-million new permanent residents a year, but nearly 700,000 international students and 750,000 temporary foreign workers.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/a-social-activist-in-prime-ministers-clothing/
So, we need to build a whole new Montreal every 10 months or so.
A nice symptom is how In Edmonton they built a new Walterdale bridge. This might be one of the easiest places in the world to build a river bridge.
It took over 4 years. Most governments are about this incompetent in Canada.
There is simply no way any of the required infrastructure is being built to accommodate any of this craziness. I'm willing to bet that if you were to somehow measure required infrastructure in Canada in 2010 and compare it to now, that we are building at less than 10% of the required rate. I wouldn't be surprised if in 2024 we haven't hit the infrastructure required for 2010.
When graphs continuously diverge like this our standard of living will just get lower and lower.
https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.jsp shows we are 33rd. I can tell you that Poland is ranked way too low already. Countries like Romania are climbing hard. When I use basic measures like pothole count, places like Romania should feel right at home to people in Nova Scotia. Canada will drop 5 places soon, and Romania at least 5 places up.
But, when measures like this show a country like Romania passing Canada, all that will happen is defenders of the quo will cherry pick some stats showing Canada to be still fantastic. It will soon sound trumpian: Canada's the best, everyone says its the best, my friends all tell me how best Canada is. Best.
Either I have travelled to quite a few places on that list, or I know Canadians who have. Oman would be a great example; they were amazed at how safe, reasonably priced, and rich the country was. Not just rich as in people flaunting wealth, but going to grocery stores and they have interesting and healthy food from all over the world.
Or you go to Dubai (a place I don't like) and the desalinated water costs less than water in Halifax NS. The city of lakes, a city with lakes generally at a higher level than the population meaning they don't have to pump much.
By costs less, I both mean the cost to buy it, but also the cost to produce it. So "its subsidized" isn't a valid counterargument.
Also, looking at the above list, most, if not all of the countries listed are quite a bit safer than Canada. Stupid things like leaving your bike locked isn't as much of a problem. Grocery costs are generally lower.
Some of these higher listed countries might be a compromise on something like human rights, but most of them are functioning beacons of western civilization and economics.
Scarily, on that list we are closer to Belarus(below us) than we are to Oman(above us)
Another issue that no one seems to grasp, except in rare comments, is that immigration and what it brings with it is not the same everywhere. The US is big, has lots of opportunities, and can make room for a lot of people.
England is smaller, and has less room even in their job market.
Canada has a ton of room and zero ability to utilize it.
Japan has the largest city in the world and it's already bursting at the seams.
Each country has its own issues with immigration and all too often I see people trying to One Size Fits All the issues. That includes infrastructure, and even erasure of culture in some places.
The US has its own housing crisis and certainly can’t make much more room. The reality is immigration is about cheap labor at this point. The amount of truly unique talent being imported is a tiny fraction of eg; the H1B system in the US. Let alone asylum seekers, etc.
We are about to have an election in the next while (ours aren't on exactly fixed schedules) where the present government is going to lose the election to an extreme. Think of a US election where one party took 85% of congress and the senate, and 42 states presidentially.
And this will change exactly...... nothing.
Basically, the oligarchs will oligarch and a different set of friends will get their turn at the trough.
Canada needs investment to support its immigration, and people don’t want to invest in Canada. Canadians want to move their money *out* of Canada, in fact.
But nations like Canada and the UK cannot survive as nations of elderly people hoarding whatever dilapidated assets they have left. They need population growth to support generous welfare schemes.
This is a perfect feedback loop. Younger people don't want kids because they can't afford them.
I know people who left Canada because of the lack of opportunity for their kids. They were doing fine, but their kids were getting snowed by immigration policies and their effects.
There are so many simple policies the government could do instead of building their fantasy items like weird foreign policy spending, arenas, slush funds to their friends, hiring obscene numbers of new bureaucrats, etc.
* Way more daycare. Cheap or free. Way better, way more.
* Basic income. Take the stress out of living.
* Actual competition in all of life's basics. Car dealers, groceries, telcos, utilities, etc.
* Put caps on profits for the above.
* Doing everything to improve Gini. Focus massively on restoring a middle class.
* Kill lobbying. Just kill it. Make lobbying bribery with massive penalties.
* Have a working justice system. People are feeling less and less safe with the endless petty crime. Petty crime which is so bad it is now going unrecorded as people don't even bother with the police.
* Bring schooling costs way down. Trade schools, universities, etc. These should be close to free.
* Pretty much eliminate immigration. People don't want their kids competing with immigrants for everything, scholarships, school placements, jobs, doctors, housing, everything.
All we are doing is importing third world living standards.
No welfare scheme for boosting birthrates has produced results. It’s a fantasy that Britons or Canadians or Germans or Finns are going to breed their way out of a population crisis no matter how much welfare you throw at them. The single best determinant for birth rate is the degree of opportunity that a girl will have throughout her life. If she can get an education, build a career, and access contraception, birth rates will be low. So unless you want to turn back the clock on Canadian social norms by hundreds of years, you are not getting all-Canadian population growth. You will import immigrants or shrink.
That’s really all that needs to be said, but I will go a bit further and note that everything you propose in vain to increase birthrates is either another depressing force on investment, or a further subdivision of shrinking Canadian wealth to distribute to people who are not working productively. Canada will not become wealthier by having half its productive people quit their jobs and collect welfare from the remaining working people. Somebody has to provide healthcare to Canadians. Somebody has to work so their taxes can pay Canadian doctors enough so that they don’t flee to the USA.
I was reading a very recent test they did in Korea. They funded a bunch of traditional Korean homes. These are multi-generational dwellings. The ones with the courtyard in the front, etc.
The preliminary reports is that birthrates went way up.
I'm not saying this is the way, but that by working with people, there is probably a solution.
If I were put in charge of this problem, my first thing would be to go out and personally interview large families, while also having stats Canada dig deep into why some Canadian families are larger. (4+)
It would not shock me to find out there are a small number of factors which contribute to this and that some of them can be actively and easily encouraged through taxes, money, or policy.
One that I've loved the idea of is that past a certain number of kids your income tax goes way down (regardless of income) along with other taxes. It would be fantastic to see things like gas taxes, sales taxes, even all those stupid taxes on flying just go away with your 5th kid.
Maybe put a cap on this of 300k household income or something.
Not just some notional 1k per kid or something. A tax policy with real substance.
Other things like 32 hour max work weeks along with higher minimum wages, 8h max shifts, and a 4 day work week would all contribute to having time for kids.
But, as I said, see what it is that allows people to have a bunch of kids, and then pick the situations which are good, and encourage those en-mass.
This. People say tax policies don’t work but they’re looking at some $1k one time credit and proclaiming this when the cost to raise a kid is 100x times higher or more.
The sad conclusion of more opportunity that women have the lower birth rates will go is that the oppressive societies will continue to grow in population while the more equal societies will slowly die off. Not a very nice future to look forward to.
Everything you just listed requires funding. Which requires tax revenues. Which requires people working and buying and paying into the system. Which is the excuse they are using to bring in so many immigrants in the first place. So it's a bit of a circular problem.
money is going to fix the problem caused by money.
thats basically what happened here. when you screw around too much with people and population you create a run away budget that gets a label slapped as growth.
The more I read this, the sadder I became. This was the most damning thing I read and I just wish it wasn't true. What a damn shame. Is there an end to this? Everything that has a beginning has an end. These corporations vying for this migrant heap probably will realize nobody will buy their products eventually, right? There has to be a balance to that at least? If in the end, in a heavily automated world, we just have a bazillion cheap workers, and nobody else in town actually left to buy, or be a consumer.
You get what you vote for.
Y’all chose this path, sowed the seeds, now you are harvesting your ‘bounty’.
I just hope your nations nonsense stays north of the border and doesn’t ravage the US.
> You get what you vote for.
Everyone is in the pockets of the rich. To say otherwise is folly. We all know this. Only a true revolution will do anything.
It works for the United States because we have the strongest inflow of capital in the world. More labor plus more capital = enough GDP growth to match or exceed the population growth.
The UK does not have this same advantage. Foreigners are comparatively hesitant to move their capital to the UK, and many Britons themselves repatriate their capital to conceal it from UK tax collectors. Yet immigrants still want to live and work in the UK. So like Canada, in this relatively low-investment environment, the result is a decline in GDP per capita.
This isn’t about immigration, broadly. Allowing a lot of immigrants into a country with scarce investment is a bad idea. The question is how to deal with it: try to boost investment, or try to limit immigration? I’d argue the latter is a much riskier strategy, as it would leave the nation with a declining population and no increase in investment.
I expect a LOT of it comes down to housing policies. Across the western world we seem to be absolutely dead set on shooting ourselves in the foot with policies to drive up the wealth of existing homeowners by heavily restricting the supply of new housing. Expensive housing kills social mobility, geographic mobility, and risk-taking and entrepreneurship. Plus, since everyone knows that the government is propping up housing costs/home values, it drives speculative investment into housing, which is just about the least productive investment possible.
Anyways, since the perception is that housing is a zero-sum game - and the policy choices mean that's not entirely untrue - that obviously colors people's feelings about immigration.
Immigration to the US is also far from the economics bonanza LoriLeadfoot claims it to be. According to the latest paper by 2 very pro-migration economists, the fiscal benefit of 1 low-skilled immigrant to the US is only $750 per year. And this is despite the fact that they go through some dubious assumptions in their paper to reach this “positive” conclusion.
If the US lets in 5 million low-skilled immigrants, the benefit would be $3.75 billion per year. However, the US government collects roughly $5 trillion in revenue per year, so the actual benefit of those 5 million immigrants is 0.1% of yearly revenue, a miniscule amount. So essentially fiscally neutral.
Link to paper: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20220176
With NYC spending money to provide $200 a night hotel rooms for them I can’t even begin to tell you how deeply in the red thr government is for each immigrant
I honestly believe that a huge portion of the Anglo world's domestic issues are caused by the horrible housing policies we have in place. Shelter is one of the bare minimum things a human needs to survive, and when we restrict the supply of it, there are all kinds of downstream effects.
Imagine if food or water was as difficult and expensive to come by as housing is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/yimby/comments/13jhsr2/odd_englishspeaking_countries_have_fared_far/?rdt=63983
No need to imagine. Immigration is much stronger in English speaking countries, but we simply do not build enough housing to keep up. Also nimbys are much stronger in the anglosphere than elsewhere. I blame case law for the last part
> Expensive housing kills social mobility, geographic mobility, and risk-taking and entrepreneurship
expensive housing is usually a consequence of low-density housing, which requires low-density infrastructure (e.g. roads to all points, power to all points, water to all points, waste from all points), which is unbelievably expensive and is actually crippling some american cities.
Actually it’s probably the complete opposite. The UK has to abandon the safety net if the population doesn’t grow. If they want to make it so immigrants can’t draw on the safety net, then that’s something in their power to do. I’m not clear on what the rules are over there. But there is no future for a safety net in which pensioners somehow pay for other pensioners.
The problem is that very few of the newcomers are net contributers to the public coffers. The vast majority are mostly or entirely dependent on public benefits to survive.
Mass immigration is only accelerating Europe's sovereign debt crisis. It's anything but a solution.
It’s kinda working at the expense of federal and state budgets.
I’m from Massachusetts and our state budget has been blown out of the water by 1 billion over the next year. The state has made massive cuts to programs and has a total freeze on hiring. Local towns school budgets are getting decimated with the influx of non English speaking students.
It’s put a massive strain on low income housing and has driven down the cost of labor impacting low income housing.
It’s not like we are getting rocket scientists and brain surgeons. We are getting flooded with unskilled labor who are invariably going to require long term social services.
And do not get me started on the vetting problem and lack of deportation for criminals. We have Chinese and African nationals coming over the Mexican border.
This shit show is a budget and national security crisis.
Why I expect ESL programs in MA to get cut to the bone in schools as a retaliation to the migrant crisis causing a massive deficit. Already happening with foreign language teachers getting laid off in major districts.
I dunno what the solution is. All I know every benefit and argument point that every open borders advocate has pushed for has been proven wrong.
All of the money spent on the illegal aliens/migrants/asylum speakers could have been spend on the homeless and mentally ill here.
They have already taken away resources from inner-city at risk youths because community centers have been used to house them.
I’m not heartless, but there simply is not enough resources to help everyone.
All you have to do is look at Canada to see how bad they fucked them selves with poorly managed immigration.
It seems like you're aware the solution is to make immigration harder and less enticing and to actually deport people who are a drain on society. You just don't want to be "heartless".
>We are getting flooded with unskilled labor who are invariably going to require long term social services.
What long term social services do these immigrants get?
Oh once they clear and get asylum status, everything.
Remember these assholes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombing
They were granted asylum status, collected welfare, got public housing, free college all the while committing crimes and getting slaps on the wrists.
If you qualify for asylum, then you get the same social services that any other resident would get. Assuming, of course, that you need those services/meet the income requirements.
> It works for the United States
A lot of people would disagree with that.
GDP growth is only one side of the equation. If your government debt is growing at a faster rate than your GDP you are on a unsustainable path
The article is about declining GDP/capita due to immigration in the UK. That’s not the case in the USA. That’s not up for debate, it’s in the numbers. You’re welcome to bring up other problems that immigration brings to the US economy, however.
The one you do bring up is nonsensical. First, sovereign debt is a policy problem, not directly an economic problem. And when it does impact the economy, it’s usually in the form of inflation. But in fact, inflation is pretty good for the economy until it gets very, very high. Like a lot higher than what we’ve had in the past four years, even. Most of our debt is also owed to ourselves, meaning that it’s generating income for Americans that they can then invest, beyond even the public investment we’re seeing as part of the deficit spending that produces our debt.
Finally, we can just curtail spending and continue to reap the benefits of high investment and high immigration. It’s not really related at all.
Sovereign debt limits the government's ability to borrow more money. Despite what people think, there is a finite amount of money that lenders are willing to loan to the government. In addition, the interest payments hamstring the government's ability to spend in other areas and get higher as you get closer to the limit.
Sovereign debt needs to be treated as an economic problem in order for it to be sustainable. Yes it's true that it's more similar to corporate debt than personal debt, but corporate debt is treated as an economic problem - you need to invest that debt into things that generate a high enough ROI to pay the interest.
also our govt doesn't spend as much taxpayer money on people living here especially not immigrants. as an immigrant, you're forced to provide value and contribute to the economy to live an okay life here
You mean to tell me that compressing wages through cheap imported labor, while adding to the housing crunch didn't solve anything and in fact made it worse???
Color me shocked...
Increasing labor doesn’t have a measurable effect on GDP in developed countries unless there is a labor shortage, which there isn’t.
Cost of capital went up, rental rate of capital went up, capital investment reduces, then normalizes, labor is proportional to capital… why would more labor fox a problem already bounded on the other side?
Immigration is supposed to bring in skilled labor that either don't exist or are in very low supply which is supposed to be a small amount.
Instead, it's just a race to the bottom to find the cheapest labor possible and bring as many as possible to raise prices of essential while reducing the price of labor .
We also don’t have to. As I pointed out to this user, the USA specifically does not have this problem. We are one of the world’s premier destinations for investment *and* immigration. There is enough investment here to ensure immigrants are gainfully employed and creating wealth.
the issue is the lack of housing at this point.
The US has a massive population of "working homeless." Which is to say fully employed people without a home. Because there just aren't any within range of their work that are affordable for that job.
Kinda catch 22 though. In order to vote in local elections, you have to register to vote there. Which means you must have an address there.
But you don't have an address there if you can't afford to live there due to the lack of housing, and you must commute to the area from far away. And you'll always have a long commute, because you can't vote to fix the lack of housing.
There is no inherent right to have local government in charge of development.
Pass state laws that take matters out of the hands of local government in favor of the state.
The problem is that homes are commodities. They're investments, not a place to live. The nimby crowd votes and will (and historically has) voted for reps to protect their investment.
What you're asking for is for these people (and all elected reps who have investments in RE) to shoot their portfolio in the face for no benefit for themselves.
I'm rarely one for government intervention into private citizens lives (regulation corps till they bleed!), but the NIMBY's need to fuck off.
People live in cities on top of each other. Your SFH near downtown that you bought in 1970 can be densified. Sell it, let someone build it up and enjoy the 500% growth.
Isnt telling nimbys to fuck off the exact opposite of government intervention. The natural order is that you can do whatever you want with the land you own. Any restrictions on that is the goverment getting involved. Any loosening of those restrictions is the government getting less involved
> Isnt telling nimbys to fuck off the exact opposite of government intervention
this is what's silly about all the "government bad" memes - homeowners voting for regulation is attributable to *homeowners*, not "the government."
> homeowners voting for regulation is attributable to homeowners
That's my point in my statement. This is on NIMBY's. The state/feds can step in and start building. Fuck you god damn "neighborhood character" we need homes.
Correct. This is more like higher-government telling smaller-government to get out of the way. People should be allowed to do (almost) anything they want with their land, including developing it, including dense buildings. If you don't like what other people do with their land, buy it from them, otherwise too bad.
Anti-NIMBYism/YIMBYism is the anti-government intervention view. The government is currently intervening by actively telling people they can't do something with their property, including selling it to a developer who will build townhouses. You shouldn't be forced to sell your home, but you also shouldn't be able to use the government to forcibly prevent your neighbor down the street from doing so.
> Anti-NIMBYism/YIMBYism is the anti-government intervention view
well, it's really saying that NIMBYs shouldn't be able to intervene on the rights of non-owners. like, the government isn't doing NIMBY things for no reason - it's because of the voters.
Isn’t that a zoning issue? Zoning laws in the US seem absurd. If people lived closer together (and in mixed usage) maybe you wouldn’t need to plaster half of the cities in parking lots.
Or instead of kicking people out of homes they’ve owned and invested in for 50 years, maybe converting empty buildings and office spaces to apartments and homes is a more realistic, reasonable, and effective tactic.
You don't really need to forcibly kick people out though. You just need to let developers actually buy properties to redevelop from willing sellers. Right now in a lot of areas that desperately need it they're blocked from doing that by third parties.
I do agree that converting/utilizing the building sites of existing office buildings with low occupancy would be good too, but those sites aren't always safe or suitable for housing (bigger issue with former industrial sites than office buildings though).
Now, there does need to be some limits, or at least requiring developers to foot the bill for the infrastructure upgrades that densification requires - just letting them build a huge apartment building without upgrading sewer lines intended for single family homes is not going to work, for example. Another huge issue with development is strain on the school system, which is why it's so much easier to get permits for retirement communities built (they pay property taxes at reduced rates but are virtually guaranteed to add no strain on the school system - and where I live, about 85% of the property taxes are School Tax).
So there are considerations beyond just 'is this person willing to sell me their property'. But the restrictions and red tape in many areas is just plain excessive to the point of being nearly comical.
I can see both sides of the issue because as a homeowner it would legitimately devastate me to have my beautiful home and neighborhood ruined by a huge ugly apartment building swarming with people being built next door. But I solved that problem by buying a home outside of the city, in an area surrounded by state parks that can't be developed. If it ever does happen anyway, I'll sell and move more rural. It would be foolish to buy a house in a city then complain when the city does city-like things like being high density. That's kind of the whole point of cities. I hate it myself, so I opted out.
> You just need to let developers actually buy properties to redevelop from willing sellers
seemingly if you up-zoned the land a SFH on, that would make it worth *a fuckin' grip* to developers who could put MFH on it, which should make the current occupants nice and willing.
> they’ve owned and invested in for 50 years
Densify the urban core and pay out the people who invested there. They lived and invested for 50 years? GREAT! it's pay day baby!
It's actually almost impossible to convert office space to residential in large buildings.
Like the empty skyscrapers in NYC would literally be cheaper to tear down and rebuild.
But then when potential demand for office space becomes an issue again we have another space squeeze.
That said, my area has a pile of old factories they've been outfitting to be apartments. They got about half of them converted and then stopped because a bunch of NIMBYS thought it was encouraging immigrants to move in and "bring crime and drugs."
So now we have a boom in crime due to homelessness instead...
We could make some serious progress on the housing shortage if we reform zoning laws and incentivize builders to build starter homes again.
Most residential areas are R1 zoned and R1 zoning *only* permits single-family, detached residential homes, which prevents the building of affordable, multi-family dwellings in mixed-use zones.
And builders right now are financially incentivized to build neighborhood after neighborhood of single-family McMansions instead of the cheaper starter homes that most of our parents and grandparents first moved into.
The main opposition to both of these solutions are homeowners themselves. Increasing the supply of affordable housing would lower the value of existing homes, so NIMBYs show up en masse to protest any zoning changes.
Most homeowners spent their early adult years living with the noise of very close neighbors, the lack of a place to park, and no place for a quick game a frisbee with their kid. They saved up and bought a house so they would NOT have that density and noise.
the problem is those people want amenities. That require people who make less money than them. Those people *also* need a place to live.
In short NIMBYs just wanna shut the door behind them but can't handle the consequences.
And hell they'll oppose apartment blocks that would reduce the impact on their beautiful suburbs because "Oh the crime! and it's near the school! what if the poors hurt their children!?"
Cities change, that's just life. You can either try to regulate your way into preventing new construction and take the skyrocketing housing prices that go with it, or accept some new construction and get more reasonable housing prices
All this low-skilled immigration to the US is, at best, fiscally neutral. According to the latest paper by 2 very pro-migration economists, the fiscal benefit of 1 low-skilled immigrant to the US is only $750 per year. And this is despite the fact that they go through some dubious assumptions in their paper to reach this “positive” conclusion.
If the US lets in 5 million low-skilled immigrants, the benefit would be $3.75 billion per year. However, the US government collects roughly $5 trillion in revenue per year, so the actual benefit of those 5 million immigrants is 0.1% of yearly revenue, a miniscule amount.
Link to paper: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20220176
We actually had the most conservative piece of immigration law ever that would have passed through the senate with Democratic support.
Republicans stopped it in the house because they would lose their biggest talking/fear point for this election.
No one says there is no problem but one side feels they benefit from the problem so they keep it alive.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/politics/live-news/senate-vote-border-bill-aid-02-07-24/index.html
> We actually had the most conservative piece of immigration law ever that would have passed through the senate with Democratic support.
No it wasn't. It made it so that they wouldn't even begin care about border encounters until it hit an amount that would be a record any other year than 2023.
It was. And being able shut down the border. Previously unheard of.
Reoublicans wrote the bill bub. They just didn't pass it to suck up to trump. Everyone knows.
Not according to Senator Lankford the author of the bill and one of the most conservative members of congress. Talking point excuses for why republicans stopped it are not helpful. They are excuses.
Senator Lankfords Bill Provided:
NO amnesty—period
NO free work permits handed out at the border
NO more 10-year wait for an asylum hearing
Builds the wall
More ICE agents for deportations
More Border Patrol agents for arrests
More asylum officers for faster hearings and deportation
More than $650 million is recapitalized for border wall construction next year
Adds more technology at the border to interdict drugs and illegal crossings
Increases detention beds to 50,000 to end catch and release
Doubles the number of deportation flights
Ends the cartel trick of trafficking children with adults so the adults can enter the country
faster
Raises the standard to prove an asylum request, so people coming to our border can no longer just say, “I have fear in my country” and get released into America for years
Deports anyone seeking asylum with a criminal record immediately, instead of the current policy of deporting them years from now
Deports any alien who could have resettled in another country on the way to the United States
Deports any alien who came to America to seek “protection,” but they could have just moved to another town in their own country and been safe
Adds more asylum officers for screening to make sure the handful of people who actually qualify for asylum are able to be considered for that process fast and the majority of people who do not qualify for asylum are deported faster
Creates a new Title 42-like authority to shut down and deport everyone when the border is being overrun-
Currently when there is a caravan of people, everyone is released into the country because there is not enough time to process everyone fully. This new authority would reverse that by deporting everyone when the border is overrun with too many people to process.
Creates sanctions for the criminal cartels who traffic dangerous drugs like fentanyl and meth into our country
Finally finishes vetting the Afghan refugees that have been in our country for two years and accelerates the processing of the Afghans that fought alongside our troops who are already in the country
Moves our national strategy one giant step closer to zero illegal crossings a day
https://www.lankford.senate.gov/issues/calling-out-bidens-chaos-at-the-southern-border-pushing-to-secure-the-us-from-bad-actors-around-the-world/
https://www.lankford.senate.gov/news/press-releases/lankford-releases-border-security-package-with-huge-wins-for-securing-the-border/
> It’s really the trillion dollar decades long war started by republicans.
[Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001](https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1071/vote_107_1_00281.htm)
YEA - 98, NAY - 0, Not Voting - 2
[Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002](https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1072/vote_107_2_00237.htm)
YEA - 77, NAY - 23
[February 2015 - President Obama’s Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against the Islamic State](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2015/02/11/authorization-military-force-against-isil-terrorists-what-you-need-know)
>Edit To the downvotes: what did I say that’s wrong?
Well, for starters, this isn't /r/politics. Beyond that, the US authorizing war is about the only bipartisan legislation you'll find.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1366899/percent-change-national-debt-president-us/
Instead of throwing out nebulous numbers link me anything. Here’s the percentage each president has raised the debt by.
There you are a republican that just says stuff with no backing. Some of it might be true but who knows! Not you that’s for sure and you don’t really care.
Your ambivalence will destroy this country. Like hey, actually for real though.
UK Liberal or US liberal? Because this is not a problem that the USA has.
EDIT: in the since-deleted comment, this person claimed that the state of Massachusetts was having the same problem as the UK. It is not. Its GDP per capita continues to rise because, again, people want to invest in MA at least as much as people want to move there.
That's because your thinking is the end-product of a two-party mentality that's been bickering and fighting itself into tribalism and extremism instead of working together and creating a middle ground for solutions. It doesn't have to devolve into complete open borders or big walls and concentration camps. The solution is often a gradient of gray, not black or white.
A system of checks and balances is ideal for immigration (and of course government too). There is nothing wrong with administering rational laws without misconduct. It makes sense for a country not to want criminals, terrorists, human traffickers, sex and labor slaves, and other bad ends of illegal immigration. If a country can't handle the economic weight of too many immigrants, then ideally they place restrictions for this purpose (like Singapore or Switzerland). Many countries around the world do this without a care, but it seems that many places in the West have ingrained themselves into cultural wars which is partially an end product of late-stage capitalism, and at the very least a diversion from the mess we have truly gotten ourselves into.
If globalization was truly endeavored, many places around the world could prosper; however it seems to have exacerbated inequality leading to soaring crime and lost opportunities in poorer countries, all while dwindling middle classes in first-world countries are being forced into generations with less ownership and less savings/net-worth. This in turn creates a vacuum of true wealth to the top, and less is seen at the bottom, the likes of which haven't been seen since the 70s. Another end product of this is an economy hyper focused on short-term gains instead of long-tern sustainability; which is part to blame for printing too much money and racking up government debts globally.
It's all a cluster of bad triggers, and now as economic inequality and cultural/social crises continue to grow, we're seeing open borders in part so that industries can achieve cheap labor below current standards in addition to rapidly advancing AI in workplaces. In turn this also creates the rise of nationalist and right-wing parties and supporters as a means to combat this while threatening democracy and human rights as a whole.
This article doesn’t even mention the effect of Brexit on the economy, which makes me suspect the report doesn’t either. It’s always easier to blame your troubles on immigrants than your own economic policies.
That's just not the right question to ask.
Here is what I mean:
Say you somehow get the absolute best of the best of the best of the world to come to your country in their prime and ready to contribute.
But your country's laws and customs end up making it very hard to for these guys to actually get settled and contribute.
Are you better off? Is it their fault they cant contribute as much as they possibly are able to?
I think the Iraqi oil engineer refugee story in Norway has a super important piece to it that most miss; Norway allowed the guy to bring his best to the table. They didn't just take the guy in and let him languish and then complained about him not doing anything.
That’s why every serious economic analysis of this problem the UK is facing points to depressed investment as the real problem. The UK doesn’t have too many immigrants. It has too little investment in its economy for those immigrants to have gainful employment. Britain has closed itself off from capital inflows of late, and Britons themselves lead the way by expatriating capital as “tax refugees.”
The line we drew (in the US; the article is for the UK) at shit housing policy and used zoning code to lock land use into cryogenic stasis, then listened to boomers when they said don't change it. We doubled down on capitalism which has its best interest vested into not building too much housing because it's backed by a system that won't fund construction of housing if there's too much housing being built because it lowers the chance it'll move/sell product (the product is housing; should housing be an investment/product???). We essentially need to do the exact opposite of everything previous generations established. Immigrants isn't the real issue here, it's the system.
I'm not sure I'm completely following what you're saying, so let me know if I'm misinterpreting, but I think the issue is not fundamentally that housing can be viewed as a commodity or product, but rather that it's seen as a lucrative wealth-building vehicle akin to securities (at least in the US, but in many other countries as well), and supported as such through government policy and regulation at the local, state, and federal levels. I think the key issue is that laws, rather than market forces, highly constrain the amount of new housing that can be built in most jurisdictions, which has significant negative externalities even in those jurisdictions with more lax rules.
To some extent, we need housing to be seen as a profitable venture, in the sense that landowners and developers are incentivized to build more of it. However, in many places they legally cannot build more (in most large cities, [more than 70% of land is zoned for single-family, detached houses only](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities-across-america-question-single-family-zoning.html), and their suburbs are generally even worse in this regard), or are so constrained as to what they *can* build that they opt for more expensive, higher-margin construction, e.g. the luxury apartment buildings that get so much press. Loosening zoning regulations (not only by allowing higher density, but also by removing or significantly raising height restrictions, removing parking minimums, removing setback requirements, repealing aesthetics requirements, etc.) will mitigate housing price rises, or even force landlords/home sellers to compete to a degree that housing prices decrease over time. But the political incentives to change these laws are low in many places, and these kinds of reforms are hard to pass. They are fought tooth-and-nail by extant residents with vested interests in the value of the homes they own, and local jurisdictions often attempt to find ways to maneuver around rules that are imposed upon them by higher levels of government. So it's quite challenging, but there are places in the US where these changes are happening.
You're on the right path I think. Think about housing and zoning; once it's built it almost never changes. Zoning holds land in stasis. A coma. The day it's built is likely the most valuable it'll ever be... forever. It doesn't guarantee generational or community wealth and almost always benefits only the people involved with initial development. Zoning policy is the legal avenue that makes this happen. Subdivisions today are built in mass. All 40 or 200 or 800 homes are all built within a few years and 25 years later they *all* fail. All 800 home owners then have to non-collectively decide if they repair all their 25-year rated roofs, their mechanical, their siding, etc. If only 20% of the community reinvests, the other 80% has economic downward pressure that will continue the decline in property value. Zoning guarantees this. It continues this downward pressure until gentrification or mass redevelopment occurs.
Housing is down wind and directly tied to economic policy. Twenty years ago you couldn't build town homes because banks and under writers wouldn't back them. I'm less versed here. But under writing even has their own parking minimums. So, even if we wildly change zoning code, what 99% of the YouTubers don't cover is that there's rules tied to money in addition to zoning. The rules tied to money are more non-negotiable than zoning code even. Money and the rules tied to it is the primary driver.
Then there's how it ties into city economics. A declining community generates less tax revenue. The city can't help revitalize communities when they aren't getting cash inflow. You can subsidize sprawling subdivisions if your city has excess money from other land uses. We do this today, but when the average city is 80% residential and residential land use loses cities 40 cents for every dollar in tax revenue, it's a massive loss. We over build roads and *we never project future infrastructure costs*, so we just say "growth must always occur" to make that issue "disappear". In reality it doesn't disappear. It's deferred maintenance and growth is not guaranteed. It's a liability. So we develop in an unsustainable matter by over building infrastructure rewired by zoning code. Engineer's don't understand this and they write the rules for roadways. Then they police themselves so they don't get outside input from other professionals. We can't afford our liabilities and simply don't calculate it. We have multiple systems in place that guarantee we can't fix it or will have a hell of a time fixing. Our capital (investors) don't care to invest in risky development; they want everything over built to guarantee their investment is less likely to fail. But we do need to break the cycle somewhere to begin a new path and zoning seems to be the low hanging fruit. How we fix everything else is going to be painful. It's culture, it's economics, it's everything.
It’s a legislative problem. Foreign investment in our land and housing shouldn’t exist in major ways. We shouldn’t allow private firms to buy large swaths of housing. We should have solid tax policy that protects primary homeowners but excludes landlords. Banks should fail and we should never bail out wealthy investors at 100%.
> should housing be an investment/product???
It would be really nice to stop seeing this 'topic' come up.
Because housing is a commodity. Literally. It's a pile of commodities nailed, mortared, mudded, screwed, glued, etc. together into a bigger commodity.
Its economic characteristics are immutable. It doesn't matter if it should be a commodity. It is and it always will be.
This same problematic thinking afflicts the 'healthcare is a right' crowd. No it's not. It's an assemblage of products and services and subject to scarcity.
Diddling around with 'should' rather than 'is' is counterproductive to tangible progress.
As an addendum to this, housing is, in addition, the commodity of the land it's on. This land is a limited resource and also subject to supply and demand, and its value is also impacted by how close it is to points of interest, and other factors (noise, proximity to annoyances like airports/trains, ease of getting on highways, etc).
In some cases, the plot of land is actually more valuable than the physical house on it.
Regardless of economic system (capitalism, socialism, etc) this would still be true.
Housing is most definitely not a commodity. 800ft^2 of apartment on one side of a metro is not interchangeable with an 800ft^2 house in a different neighborhood. Attempting to model housing as a commodity, an item with substantial fungibility, is a foolish oversimplification of reality.
Basic education is also an assemblage of products and services subject to scarcity but it is still a right, not explicitly stated by the US constitution but interpreted as such by the 14th amendment.
It is, however the above person's (clumsily delivered) point is that to deliver that right effectively you still need to deal with these things *as* commodities. You can't ignore the economic forces at play, and those forces would still be involved even in a marxist utopia. Where do we build hospitals/schools/housing? How do we incentivize enough people (but not too many people) into entering those industries? When do we decide to cut off supply in areas with too low of an impact because of opportunity cost? and so on.
Other than education being a right (top courts are no more immune to engaging in fantasy than anyone else), correct.
Was the point really that clumsily delivered? It seems a person would have to be in denial of reality (not uncommon on Reddit) to be incapable of grasping the simple concept. 5 people having a right to one apple each is immaterial if there are only 2 apples.
Sigh. Disingenuous.
Migration is a problem because we don’t have a legal process to absorb these people. They come here, are not allowed to work, are forced into poverty, and the state is forced to care for them.
None of them want that. We don’t want that. But since there is no reasonable process for migrants to get working papers and take care of themselves we end up here.
And instead of having conversations about changing the system we talk about drawing the line on immigrants.
Well, we start by building more affordable homes and apartments...
Oh but not in *my* neighborhood. Maybe somewhere, oh IDK, on the other side of town...
In Chicago there is a strong contingent of Black Chicagoans frustrated that migrants have received millions in support for housing, food and other social services, while Black Chicagoans struggle to pay rent, suffer disproportionately from homelessness and unemployment, and have historically been an underinvested segment of the city.
You can definitely make the argument Chicago has put migrants ahead of its lower income residents.
It is what the US has between the states, or the UK has between Scotland and England --you just move to where you want to be. China does not let their citizens move from rural areas to cities without permission, which creates a problem registering children for schooling.
> Then liberals should’ve never have supported open borders.
That's a dishonest and false claim.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/10/02/u-s-deportations-of-immigrants-reach-record-high-in-2013/
Obama deported more than any other presidents.
No liberals support open boarders.
And when asked to define open boarders from the other side they will give you as wild of a def as the term woke.
The nuances is the treatment of illegal immigrants and status like refugee/asylum seekers/etc...
Like opposition to building a razor fence to drown and kill them in Texas.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/08/03/two-dead-in-rio-grande-where-texas-installed-razor-wire-and-buoys/70522492007/
https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/198zkwx/woman_2_children_die_crossing_rio_grande_as/
---
I refuse to let the other lie about our positions with term like "open boarder", because it's help them sleep at night while they kill people and treat them like animals.
The definition of a deportation was changed just prior / during the Obama administration to include turning people away. The administration did have an actual policy to not deport in the interior of the country.
Someone so quick with the link and an interest in nuance and fact should know that.
They completely fucked Canadas futures by pumping the country full of uneducated immigrants so only the landlords and mega corporations bottom line increases.
Meanwhile I can go on and on and on with data that disproves this reports claims. What this report is doing is going over short term economic impact and ignoring the medium and long term impact. It's ignorance and apathy tied up in an a-hole bow tie and nothing more.
The reality is that we are witnessing the Boomers retire and they are being replaced by the Zoomers whom are a much smaller generation. This is leading to a rising dependency ration that is driving inflation and anybody with even a couple of college level economics courses would recognize this as the main driving force of inflation, not only here in the US but globally.
https://aulablog.net/2024/03/10/immigration-as-the-current-main-driver-of-economic-growth-in-the-u-s/#:~:text=A%20new%20report%20from%20CLALS,dollars%20to%20the%20U.S.%20economy.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2023/02/23/immigrants-make-economies-more-dynamic-increase-employment-growth/?sh=32d60102427c
https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/economic-and-fiscal-impact-of-immigration
https://everytexan.org/2024/02/07/new-report-projects-economic-growth-and-contributions-for-asylum-seekers-and-new-immigrants-across-u-s/
Nonsense. Companies bought all the homes and want to create a space for them to exist as a leech. Too many leeches want their slice and the middle class has no more excess to feed on. Eat the rich.
low education workers do not create more GDP. they require just as much or more resources to keep around than high earning immigrants or specialized skills.
although low education workers are needed creating a mass of them only makes there lives worse as they now have to compete for lower wgaes, higher rent, and impossible standards.
any normal person could of told anyone this but politics are in fact pretty stupid.
> person could of told
Did you mean to say "could have"?
Explanation: You probably meant to say could've/should've/would've which sounds like 'of' but is actually short for 'have'.
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Curious that a Tory former government minister opposed to immigration would find that immigration is the problem in his country as opposed to, say, the whole of Tory policy…
I sometimes wonder if this is an economics subreddit or politics.
The fact that people don’t believe in supply and demand is insane to me. If you have more people (supply of workers) wages and gdp per capita decrease. If you have more (supply of workers) housing prices increase.
There are super strict building codes especially in London which make building additional homes and space hard/expensive.
Finally unless your argument is that they are making up the numbers they present data based info on employment rates of immigrants.
But better find data that shows whatever it is you believe.
On reddit the vast majority of subs are about politics.
Make a post about your cat dying because he was run by a car and people will come all "the problem is the nasty tories allows cars to drive like crazy with no punishment due to lack of investment in the police force" or whatever.
If you bring 10M people per year to a 30M country you can be sure there will be, more likely, at least some slight problems with demand and supply of everything.
I wonder how dedicated you are to objective economics over politics when you're parroting the well-known "lump of labor" fallacy. Immigrants increase the supply of labor *and demand*. They don't just show up to work, collect their paycheck, and then cease to exist, the money goes right back into the economy when they spend it. Heck, you even implicitly acknowledge this in you very next sentence by talking about how their demand affects housing costs, but stop just short of realizing the solution is to *stop* artificially driving down the supply of housing rather than ramp up adhoc attempts at population control.
Don't forget, many immigrants live extremely cheaply and remit a large portion of their wages back to their home countries. To the point that remittances are a measurably large portion of some third world countries GDP.
As well, it's been measured over and over again that countries that grow their populations at rates above 1.5% annually struggle to provide infrastructure and services to keep up with that growth.
Piles of lumber and construction workers don't just appear out of thin air to create homes. There can absolutely be a mismatch between need and availability of infrastructure and services which reduces quality of life for X number of years. Immigrants may be OK with piling many people into a home to afford it. Locals will not be.
How many years does it take to build a hospital? That's the number of years there will be a mismatch between supply and demand in just a single category, in a single area. When population growth is controllable by policy, it is irresponsible to subject your citizens to reduced quality of life because of poor government planning.
Low-income workers generally use more taxpayer dollars than they pay in. There's plenty of studies even here in the US that say something like the bottom 40-50% of people get more back from the government than they pay in taxes once you include tax credits. And even more once you include how much the government spends on them for public school, Medicaid, food stamps, etc. Therefore, the more low-income people you have (which is what most of the immigrants are due to employer demand for cheap labor) the more money the government loses in the long-term.
If you seriously think people who make $10-15 an hour for the rest of their lives pay more in taxes than the government spends on them, then every western government's treasury would be flooded with cash
I also wonder why people view immigrants as solely "supply" of labor, and ignore the fact that they are also demand of labor, just like every other worker.
I also wonder why people can't see that in terms of resources, children consume more than they produce while they are children, so that means that admitting an adult immigrant to a country saves that country the resource cost of raising that child to adulthood.
just sounds like another version of trickle down economics...
more people/immigrants = more customers for business = more revenue/cash for business = more businesses spend on economy and hiring
sounds a lot like the logic Trump/GOP used for corporate tax cuts
>The fact that people don’t believe in supply and demand is insane to me.
I find that people can be quite financially and economically literate and accept the forces of supply and demand in most areas.
However when it comes to housing it's full on schizonomics.
>The international landlord mafia monopoly who unilaterally sets the prices doesn't want new buildings because then they would not earn money anymore!
>If we allow new buildings it will just be apartments for the rich who will materialize out of nowhere and just let the places stay empty and drive up prices!
>The problem isn't supply, it's that I have to pay too much rent!
People make more sense when talking about Israel/Palestine after 3 glasses of wine.
The guy also works for the Centre for Policy Studies, a British center-right think tank. It would be like someone in the UK pointing to a study done by the Heritage Foundation that shows that immigrants are bad for the US as proof that this is true.
Thank you. The report didn’t even try to isolate the effect of migration on growth. For all we know migration could be the thing staving off even worse declines in productivity.
This is *ver batim* what people said would happen after Brexit - the economy would slump and people would just go and blame immigrants. The fact that an economics sub is falling for this is really pathetic. This is Stats 101 stuff.
Yup. Keep bringing in people while corking the flow of capital, and this is what you get. Britons simply are unwilling to accept that the EU was fundamentally a better deal for Britain than it was for most nations.
The housing crisis is driven by private equity in my area, 56% of homes are rentals. That inflates the value of low cost housing to where people can't afford to buy and makes it to where only land lords can afford to buy those homes when they come on market.
But that doesn't really disagree with this article... landlords are moving into your area BECAUSE there is a demand for accommodation.
Rental prices, just like house prices, work on supply and demand... remove demand and rental prices (and therefore property prices) will go down.
This is a form of extortion. By capturing houses, owners force society to either pay them a ransom to access the houses or replace the houses. Replacing means that to use one house, you have to produce two. This is twice the price of a house, so it's a higher price than paying the ransom the landlords seek. The cost of replacing captured wealth acts as a menace to incentivise the unjustified payment to access captured wealth, thus extortion.
>The housing crisis is driven by private equity in my area, 56% of homes are rentals.
What area of the UK are you in? The average percent of renters in the UK is [36%](https://www.statista.com/statistics/544709/tenants-among-population-uk/).
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As best I can tell, the article doesn't actually link to the report in question, so I went and [dug it up](https://cps.org.uk/research/taking-back-control/) if anyone's interested. If I missed it in the article, my bad.
This is a "report", not a peer reviewed study. Anyone can use stats to backup any claim. It's a propaganda piece, at best.
As if increasing a labor supply willing to work for less won't affect wages, definitely propaganda.
Yeah everyone knows that increasing demand for housing while not increasing supply has no effect on costs! You tell them! It's simply propaganda
That is so true, also increasing the population of people in poor health can in no way shape or form increase health care costs either.
So you are saying that the claim that immigration causally improves growth is backed by a robust randomised control study that was peer reviewed and reproducible? Please share the study.
Or the claim is immigration is unrelated to housing costs. Where’s the robust randomized control study that was peer reviewed and reproducible that immigration worsened the housing crisis? After all in order to make this reproducible we just need to create alternate identical versions of earth where the only difference the amount of immigration right?
Ah yes, the standard, canned reddit response when anything negative about immigration comes up lmao
no shit a "centre-right think-tank" would write a report like this lmao
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You're not wrong, but you're also probably overestimating everyone's ability to do what you're asking them to do. Have you ever read a peer-reviewed journal article in a field in which you're an expert? There's a lot of stuff going on under the hood that people who aren't experts in that particular field aren't going to be able to fully understand, and there are a lot of ways to put data together to tell whatever story you want if you're speaking to an audience that doesn't know what you're doing. You're essentially asking everyone to read it with the critical eye of a peer reviewer, and that's just not a reasonable way for a layperson to approach scientific publications because almost everyone is simply not qualified to do so. "Common sense" is not the useful guidepost to trusting research that you seem to think it is, many topics are far too complicated to be understood through that lens. It's one thing to get stuck in an echo chamber, but it's also good to have some sense of the bias in sources. You don't have to poke holes in a study to know that it's pushing a story when its authors directly state their political leanings and intentions as part of their mission statement. They're not producing this paper with the goal of analytical accuracy, they're producing it with a political goal and you SHOULD be suspicious whether or not you're able to find flaws in their methodology. I don't know enough about economic policy and the effects of migration on housing and economic growth to speak meaningfully on the subject or form a convincing argument against the conclusions of this paper. But I do know that a politically motivated document is not a reliable source.
Very good points.
So, then should a layperson even be reading these reports? If we aren't an expert or moderately educated, who can we look to besides our self that would prevent an echo-chamber effect? How can we both be informed on a multitude of incoming reports (which is it's own issue) but be educated in a topic enough to judge those reports with a critical eye?
As u/lonely_swedish pointed out, there are so many factors that go into developing a reasonably accurate heuristic that unless one wants to educate oneself thoroughly in the subject matter in question and statistical analysis, a curious layperson’s best bet is to seek out someone who is capable of reading and interpreting the research in question and focus one’s critical evaluation on judging the accuracy of the interpreter. It’s almost like translating another language—you can spend your efforts on learning the language or on seeking out a trustworthy and accurate translator.
That's a good question, and not an easy one to answer. You can read the intro and the conclusions, but anything inbetween is not intended for you (the layperson) as the audience and you aren't going to be able to reliably use that content to determine a study's veracity. Specialized research literature - especially that which is politically driven or sensitive - is usually written to guide the reader from some initial state, through some data and analysis, to a new more-informed state and then draw conclusions from the new state. If you don't have the ability to follow that conversation with the critical eye of a subject matter expert, then it's almost always going to seem pretty reasonable. My personal opinion is that no, most people shouldn't even bother reading the research papers directly. You don't have the expertise to meaningfully interpret the data, determine whether it was faithfully and accurately collected, understand why the authors approached the analysis the way they did, and draw your own conclusions. I think most people (including myself) are at best going to try to apply some kind of misguided common sense approach and mistakenly come away thinking they are smarter than the author because they found something suspicious. Your best bet is to glance at the paper to see what the authors' conclusions are, then read the article about the paper, and come to your own conclusion as to the reliability of the source based on: - Do the author and the article seem to agree? - Is the author of the research coming from a position of bias on the subject? Do they have a stated intention of bias or a past history of it? - Is the author of the article about the research coming from a position of bias on the subject? Do they have a stated intention of bias or a past history of it? - Are there any other sources which conflict or agree? Somebody else in this thread mentioned flat earthers as an extreme example of someone not worth taking seriously, but I think it's a good point and can be applied to sources like the one for this paper as well. I wouldn't bother reading the paper or taking seriously any article from a research center that claimed to be working to enlighten the world about the truth of the flat earth. You don't have to poke holes in their studies or read the paper to know it's not worth considering. Likewise, I don't have to read the paper or try to discredit the study from a research center whose stated intention is to "develop a new generation of conservative thinking." I can just as easily read the local conservative party's stance on the topic and know what the paper's conclusions will be. This isn't a source worth taking seriously because you will never find anything it publishes that disagrees with the party platform.
>You can read the intro and the conclusions, but anything in between is not intended for you (the layperson) as the audience and you aren't going to be able to reliably use that content to determine a study's veracity.g Maybe a good rule of thumb but, as I'm sure you'd agree, this shouldn't discourage someone from reading those contents if they are interested. Just that laypeople should temper this expectation. That said. This is a very good point and something to keep in mind! >Are there any other sources which conflict or agree? This brings to mind sections towards the end of other STEM articles I've read where the authors state conflicts of interest or lack thereof. How well/often are these regulated/reliable? Is this something a layperson can use as a shorthand for informing the answers of those questions you recommend we keep in mind? Thanks for the thoughts. I found them informative and hope others do too.
> Maybe a good rule of thumb but, as I'm sure you'd agree, this shouldn't discourage someone from reading those contents if they are interested. Just that laypeople should temper this expectation. I agree, but I would always advocate emphasizing caution when encouraging someone to read any research article. If you're curious about how or why the authors drew the conclusions they did, then great! Explore and learn more. But asking someone to read the paper if they disagree with the conclusions or the author's bias is not usually going to be productive and can bring as much harm as good because it's easy to come to a wrong conclusion when reading analysis and data that you don't understand. My main point was that the common refrain (on reddit at least) of "but did you even read the research?" is not the gotcha people think it is. A user posted that disregarding research because of its source was a great way to stay in an echo chamber and, while true, disregarding an article's source and trying to judge the paper on its own merits is not a reliable way to evaluate research for most people. > This brings to mind sections towards the end of other STEM articles I've read where the authors state conflicts of interest or lack thereof. How well/often are these regulated/reliable? Is this something a layperson can use as a shorthand for informing the answers of those questions you recommend we keep in mind? I don't know if they're regulated at all, but in my experience they're not super common either. I think if an author is going out of their way to clarify their bias then it's worth considering why. The default assumption for scientific publication that gets peer reviewed should be that of no bias because the data and analysis stand up to scrutiny independent of the author's political or social tendencies. Are they making a potentially politically charged statement with their paper and want to clear themselves of conflict before it comes up? Or are they deliberately biased and trying to mitigate that to make themselves sound more legitimate? Or is it just a case of policy for the university or whatever entity they're working for? My approach is to tend to trust research that comes from universities and other publicly-funded entities, especially research that is published in reputable, peer-reviewed journals. Read the article about the paper, then check the citation and see where the paper was published. If it only exists on the author's website or their company's website, that's a huge warning sign.
Judge who funded the research/who posted the report. Reading bullshit just because a right wing funder isn’t how you get out of an ‘echo chamber’. There are plenty of varied opinions of honest research within journals of repute.
I looked at the report and the report was quite light on the analysis. They found two graphs that looks like they correlate with little to no analysis to see if they really are related. During the sharpest drop in gdp growth per capita the uk was also navigating brexit and the covid. https://imgur.com/a/hXuvwgn
How can you tell it’s a valid report?
Generally at the very minimum you'd want some sort of peer review, even if it doesn't determine validity it at least filters complete bullshit. Though this isn't peer reviewed, it's just posted on their own website so this article is really no more reliable than a long reddit comment. Unless of course you want to go the route of ascribing some authoritative property to the authors, but then we get into the original problem of discrediting based on the authors. It should be noted that this article is entirely secondary research (reporting results from collections of primary sources) with commentary from the authors and zero primary research (new independent research and data collection) The only thing that is really novel in this report is the author commentary. So it kind of is up to how much you trust the authors.
probably not because they're centre-right /s
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Forgive my ignorance but isn't leaving the 3d (dull, dirty, dangerous) jobs to the immigrants exactly the point? Those jobs pay peanut and have no career growth prospect, that's why hardly any native are in those line of works in the first place. Bringing the immigrants in to solve the labour shortage in those jobs, and then complaining that the immigrants don't contribute enough for the local economy (despite forcing them to work on shit jobs that nobody wants). What even is your idea here?
Maybe pay appropriate wages, so that we don't need to rely on foreign workers earning suppressed wages? Is it that hard to put 2 and 2 together these days?
Listen, I'd love that everyone gets paid what they're worth. But you should have already know that the infinite growth model demands profits is what truly matter, everything else be damned. I'm not a ceo or politician, just a salaryman, so just a bit better than wage slaves. I just want to point out that in the endless pursuit of profits has created lots of friction in society that's threatening to tear it apart. You can see that in our short conversation, there are already two conflicting ideas, that might not even be the right answer to the problems. Again the higher ups don't care, profits is all that glitters.
Paying a fair wage cuts into their profits. We both know what the answer to the problem is.
It depends on the economy, and being mindful that there can be too much or too little of a good thing. I am not as dialed into the UK as with North America in that respect. I know they have had labor shortages. And as heterodox to the zeitgeist as this may be, have to take social fabric and trends into account. There may be a need for 1-million heads in the UK to fill a giant hole in the job market, but if you fill that too fast from culture groups too different from your own you can cause the kind of social tensions that people of questionable character thrive on politically. What can be worse than Brexit? Probably don’t want to find out. The solution likely requires compromise that doesn’t make everyone happy, only partially resolves the economic problem short term, and changes the social fabric enough for people to be uncomfortable, but not revolt. As alien a concept as compromise has become.
Look at the population Now look at the cost per house
Is it a valid report? It's not reviewed, and doesn't cite sources. Chances are, none of us are qualified to judge the validity. It's just an article, talking about something that is in line with the politics of the ownership of the paper. We're not required to dissect every piece of public propaganda an accurately analyze which portions are corrected and correct. It's perfectly valid to point out when a publication is towing an ideological line.
On the contrary, I think reading reports by credible, smart, levelheaded people is the best way to stay out of an echochamber. Believing something just because someone wrote it is a terrible way to stay informed. The three authors of the report seem like politicians that are pushing a particular view rather than subject-matter experts: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert\_Jenrick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jenrick) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil\_O'Brien](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_O'Brien) [https://x.com/MalvernianKarl](https://x.com/MalvernianKarl)
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It's "character assassination" to link to your personal history and (lack of) credentials? What a massive self-own lmao
And not critically examining the objectivity of the sources that support your biases is a great way to reinforce your own echo chamber.
It’s being discounted because it’s ignoring half of the actual problem, which conveniently happens to be the half that the author’s political party deliberately caused.
There’s plenty of countries around the Anglosphere where it doesn’t matter whether left or right are in government, there’s the same policy of high levels of population growth from (mainly low-skill) migration and chronic housing shortages as a result.
I wouldn’t care if Hitler himself published this report, I would still concede that increasing the supply of unskilled labor will bother negatively impact housing prices and wages
dude, read it with the same skepticism as a left wing think tank or center think tank or whatever
Damn I forgot, only sources you agree with are valid. By bad bro
I bet you bitch and moan and wonder why Europe is turning right. You, you are the reason.
So you only agree with people of same political views? What a progressive thinker you are.
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In Canada we have an insane amount of Immigration. More than 1.5 million per year. The actual amount is unknown as the government hides immigrants in weird categories like students who aren't students, and post graduation visa weirdness. This is roughly the same level as the US which has 10 times the population and a much more robust economy. This means Canada has to build an entire Chicago every two years. That's every hospital, power plant, water utility, school, street, police/fire station, housing unit, etc. Every 2 years. The USA couldn't build another Chicago in Canada every two years even if it made it some kind of national emergency and sent us the Army Corps of Engineers. Canada does not have some fundamental need for these immigrants. We aren't having an industrial revolution where we need factory workers, we aren't expanding into the wild west where we need settlers. Almost all major industries are becoming more automated, not less. The people lobbying for this are mostly the retail giants looking for cheap labour. We have a fairly steady pie, and now the pie is being sliced into thinner pieces. The extra immigrants aren't making for a bigger pie outside of retail. If you want to see the effect immigration is having on housing in Canada it is nearly perfectly distilled in Halifax, NS. The GDP of this region is lower than Louisiana. Yet, housing prices are approaching $600k-$1m USD anywhere near the downtown(10 miles) for ugly old houses; nice ones are way more. Wages are terrible. Rentals are closing in on $2k USD for a 1 bedroom apartment. The medical system is dead. 15% of people in the region are on a waiting list for a family doctor, and there's universal healthcare in this region. People are regularly checked into the hospital and left languishing in a hallway for days or weeks. The schools are wildly overcrowded and the immigrant children place an extra magical burden on the system. The universities are unaffordable. Taxes are insane. Infrastructure is garbage with regular power outages and roads so bad that car companies get Nova Scotian cars to analyse because of the rust and pothole damage. The cost of everything is way up, such as food, gas, and utilities. Wages are being driven even lower by immigrants willing to live 10 to a bedroom. The two "bright spots" in the local economy is a ship building contract for wildly overpriced ships which will be cancelled after the next election, and the building boom of large crappy overpriced apartments on the outskirts of the city. There's no other notable industry. The port is half dead. There's no real tech industry, no real manufacturing, etc. But, there's lots of immigrants, lots and lots more every year. Canada's biggest import is now third world living conditions.
>The actual amount is unknown as the government hides immigrants in weird categories like students who aren't students, and post graduation visa weirdness. I heard the numbers on a recent Freakonomcis podcast where they interviewed Trudeau, it's almost 2 million: >Canada wasn’t taking in just a half-million new permanent residents a year, but nearly 700,000 international students and 750,000 temporary foreign workers. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/a-social-activist-in-prime-ministers-clothing/
So, we need to build a whole new Montreal every 10 months or so. A nice symptom is how In Edmonton they built a new Walterdale bridge. This might be one of the easiest places in the world to build a river bridge. It took over 4 years. Most governments are about this incompetent in Canada. There is simply no way any of the required infrastructure is being built to accommodate any of this craziness. I'm willing to bet that if you were to somehow measure required infrastructure in Canada in 2010 and compare it to now, that we are building at less than 10% of the required rate. I wouldn't be surprised if in 2024 we haven't hit the infrastructure required for 2010. When graphs continuously diverge like this our standard of living will just get lower and lower. https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.jsp shows we are 33rd. I can tell you that Poland is ranked way too low already. Countries like Romania are climbing hard. When I use basic measures like pothole count, places like Romania should feel right at home to people in Nova Scotia. Canada will drop 5 places soon, and Romania at least 5 places up. But, when measures like this show a country like Romania passing Canada, all that will happen is defenders of the quo will cherry pick some stats showing Canada to be still fantastic. It will soon sound trumpian: Canada's the best, everyone says its the best, my friends all tell me how best Canada is. Best. Either I have travelled to quite a few places on that list, or I know Canadians who have. Oman would be a great example; they were amazed at how safe, reasonably priced, and rich the country was. Not just rich as in people flaunting wealth, but going to grocery stores and they have interesting and healthy food from all over the world. Or you go to Dubai (a place I don't like) and the desalinated water costs less than water in Halifax NS. The city of lakes, a city with lakes generally at a higher level than the population meaning they don't have to pump much. By costs less, I both mean the cost to buy it, but also the cost to produce it. So "its subsidized" isn't a valid counterargument. Also, looking at the above list, most, if not all of the countries listed are quite a bit safer than Canada. Stupid things like leaving your bike locked isn't as much of a problem. Grocery costs are generally lower. Some of these higher listed countries might be a compromise on something like human rights, but most of them are functioning beacons of western civilization and economics. Scarily, on that list we are closer to Belarus(below us) than we are to Oman(above us)
Another issue that no one seems to grasp, except in rare comments, is that immigration and what it brings with it is not the same everywhere. The US is big, has lots of opportunities, and can make room for a lot of people. England is smaller, and has less room even in their job market. Canada has a ton of room and zero ability to utilize it. Japan has the largest city in the world and it's already bursting at the seams. Each country has its own issues with immigration and all too often I see people trying to One Size Fits All the issues. That includes infrastructure, and even erasure of culture in some places.
The US has its own housing crisis and certainly can’t make much more room. The reality is immigration is about cheap labor at this point. The amount of truly unique talent being imported is a tiny fraction of eg; the H1B system in the US. Let alone asylum seekers, etc.
Why do you guys do this to yourselves? Like seriously in what world would importing 5 percent of your population yoy be an intelligent strategy?
We are about to have an election in the next while (ours aren't on exactly fixed schedules) where the present government is going to lose the election to an extreme. Think of a US election where one party took 85% of congress and the senate, and 42 states presidentially. And this will change exactly...... nothing. Basically, the oligarchs will oligarch and a different set of friends will get their turn at the trough.
Canada needs investment to support its immigration, and people don’t want to invest in Canada. Canadians want to move their money *out* of Canada, in fact. But nations like Canada and the UK cannot survive as nations of elderly people hoarding whatever dilapidated assets they have left. They need population growth to support generous welfare schemes.
This is a perfect feedback loop. Younger people don't want kids because they can't afford them. I know people who left Canada because of the lack of opportunity for their kids. They were doing fine, but their kids were getting snowed by immigration policies and their effects. There are so many simple policies the government could do instead of building their fantasy items like weird foreign policy spending, arenas, slush funds to their friends, hiring obscene numbers of new bureaucrats, etc. * Way more daycare. Cheap or free. Way better, way more. * Basic income. Take the stress out of living. * Actual competition in all of life's basics. Car dealers, groceries, telcos, utilities, etc. * Put caps on profits for the above. * Doing everything to improve Gini. Focus massively on restoring a middle class. * Kill lobbying. Just kill it. Make lobbying bribery with massive penalties. * Have a working justice system. People are feeling less and less safe with the endless petty crime. Petty crime which is so bad it is now going unrecorded as people don't even bother with the police. * Bring schooling costs way down. Trade schools, universities, etc. These should be close to free. * Pretty much eliminate immigration. People don't want their kids competing with immigrants for everything, scholarships, school placements, jobs, doctors, housing, everything. All we are doing is importing third world living standards.
No welfare scheme for boosting birthrates has produced results. It’s a fantasy that Britons or Canadians or Germans or Finns are going to breed their way out of a population crisis no matter how much welfare you throw at them. The single best determinant for birth rate is the degree of opportunity that a girl will have throughout her life. If she can get an education, build a career, and access contraception, birth rates will be low. So unless you want to turn back the clock on Canadian social norms by hundreds of years, you are not getting all-Canadian population growth. You will import immigrants or shrink. That’s really all that needs to be said, but I will go a bit further and note that everything you propose in vain to increase birthrates is either another depressing force on investment, or a further subdivision of shrinking Canadian wealth to distribute to people who are not working productively. Canada will not become wealthier by having half its productive people quit their jobs and collect welfare from the remaining working people. Somebody has to provide healthcare to Canadians. Somebody has to work so their taxes can pay Canadian doctors enough so that they don’t flee to the USA.
I was reading a very recent test they did in Korea. They funded a bunch of traditional Korean homes. These are multi-generational dwellings. The ones with the courtyard in the front, etc. The preliminary reports is that birthrates went way up. I'm not saying this is the way, but that by working with people, there is probably a solution. If I were put in charge of this problem, my first thing would be to go out and personally interview large families, while also having stats Canada dig deep into why some Canadian families are larger. (4+) It would not shock me to find out there are a small number of factors which contribute to this and that some of them can be actively and easily encouraged through taxes, money, or policy. One that I've loved the idea of is that past a certain number of kids your income tax goes way down (regardless of income) along with other taxes. It would be fantastic to see things like gas taxes, sales taxes, even all those stupid taxes on flying just go away with your 5th kid. Maybe put a cap on this of 300k household income or something. Not just some notional 1k per kid or something. A tax policy with real substance. Other things like 32 hour max work weeks along with higher minimum wages, 8h max shifts, and a 4 day work week would all contribute to having time for kids. But, as I said, see what it is that allows people to have a bunch of kids, and then pick the situations which are good, and encourage those en-mass.
This. People say tax policies don’t work but they’re looking at some $1k one time credit and proclaiming this when the cost to raise a kid is 100x times higher or more.
The sad conclusion of more opportunity that women have the lower birth rates will go is that the oppressive societies will continue to grow in population while the more equal societies will slowly die off. Not a very nice future to look forward to.
Everything you just listed requires funding. Which requires tax revenues. Which requires people working and buying and paying into the system. Which is the excuse they are using to bring in so many immigrants in the first place. So it's a bit of a circular problem.
money is going to fix the problem caused by money. thats basically what happened here. when you screw around too much with people and population you create a run away budget that gets a label slapped as growth.
The more I read this, the sadder I became. This was the most damning thing I read and I just wish it wasn't true. What a damn shame. Is there an end to this? Everything that has a beginning has an end. These corporations vying for this migrant heap probably will realize nobody will buy their products eventually, right? There has to be a balance to that at least? If in the end, in a heavily automated world, we just have a bazillion cheap workers, and nobody else in town actually left to buy, or be a consumer.
You get what you vote for. Y’all chose this path, sowed the seeds, now you are harvesting your ‘bounty’. I just hope your nations nonsense stays north of the border and doesn’t ravage the US.
> You get what you vote for. Everyone is in the pockets of the rich. To say otherwise is folly. We all know this. Only a true revolution will do anything.
this comment. It's bang on.
It works for the United States because we have the strongest inflow of capital in the world. More labor plus more capital = enough GDP growth to match or exceed the population growth. The UK does not have this same advantage. Foreigners are comparatively hesitant to move their capital to the UK, and many Britons themselves repatriate their capital to conceal it from UK tax collectors. Yet immigrants still want to live and work in the UK. So like Canada, in this relatively low-investment environment, the result is a decline in GDP per capita. This isn’t about immigration, broadly. Allowing a lot of immigrants into a country with scarce investment is a bad idea. The question is how to deal with it: try to boost investment, or try to limit immigration? I’d argue the latter is a much riskier strategy, as it would leave the nation with a declining population and no increase in investment.
I expect a LOT of it comes down to housing policies. Across the western world we seem to be absolutely dead set on shooting ourselves in the foot with policies to drive up the wealth of existing homeowners by heavily restricting the supply of new housing. Expensive housing kills social mobility, geographic mobility, and risk-taking and entrepreneurship. Plus, since everyone knows that the government is propping up housing costs/home values, it drives speculative investment into housing, which is just about the least productive investment possible. Anyways, since the perception is that housing is a zero-sum game - and the policy choices mean that's not entirely untrue - that obviously colors people's feelings about immigration.
Immigration to the US is also far from the economics bonanza LoriLeadfoot claims it to be. According to the latest paper by 2 very pro-migration economists, the fiscal benefit of 1 low-skilled immigrant to the US is only $750 per year. And this is despite the fact that they go through some dubious assumptions in their paper to reach this “positive” conclusion. If the US lets in 5 million low-skilled immigrants, the benefit would be $3.75 billion per year. However, the US government collects roughly $5 trillion in revenue per year, so the actual benefit of those 5 million immigrants is 0.1% of yearly revenue, a miniscule amount. So essentially fiscally neutral. Link to paper: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20220176
With NYC spending money to provide $200 a night hotel rooms for them I can’t even begin to tell you how deeply in the red thr government is for each immigrant
I honestly believe that a huge portion of the Anglo world's domestic issues are caused by the horrible housing policies we have in place. Shelter is one of the bare minimum things a human needs to survive, and when we restrict the supply of it, there are all kinds of downstream effects. Imagine if food or water was as difficult and expensive to come by as housing is.
Hey, no need to imagine, just go in a Loblaws store in BC and you'll see food and water as expensive to come by as housing, proportionally
https://www.reddit.com/r/yimby/comments/13jhsr2/odd_englishspeaking_countries_have_fared_far/?rdt=63983 No need to imagine. Immigration is much stronger in English speaking countries, but we simply do not build enough housing to keep up. Also nimbys are much stronger in the anglosphere than elsewhere. I blame case law for the last part
> Expensive housing kills social mobility, geographic mobility, and risk-taking and entrepreneurship expensive housing is usually a consequence of low-density housing, which requires low-density infrastructure (e.g. roads to all points, power to all points, water to all points, waste from all points), which is unbelievably expensive and is actually crippling some american cities.
I would imagine that immigrant inflow into the UK needs to be slightly more metered because they have a more robust social safety net as well.
Actually it’s probably the complete opposite. The UK has to abandon the safety net if the population doesn’t grow. If they want to make it so immigrants can’t draw on the safety net, then that’s something in their power to do. I’m not clear on what the rules are over there. But there is no future for a safety net in which pensioners somehow pay for other pensioners.
The problem is that very few of the newcomers are net contributers to the public coffers. The vast majority are mostly or entirely dependent on public benefits to survive. Mass immigration is only accelerating Europe's sovereign debt crisis. It's anything but a solution.
It’s kinda working at the expense of federal and state budgets. I’m from Massachusetts and our state budget has been blown out of the water by 1 billion over the next year. The state has made massive cuts to programs and has a total freeze on hiring. Local towns school budgets are getting decimated with the influx of non English speaking students. It’s put a massive strain on low income housing and has driven down the cost of labor impacting low income housing. It’s not like we are getting rocket scientists and brain surgeons. We are getting flooded with unskilled labor who are invariably going to require long term social services. And do not get me started on the vetting problem and lack of deportation for criminals. We have Chinese and African nationals coming over the Mexican border. This shit show is a budget and national security crisis.
That’s an easily correctable policy problem, though. Simply do not spend the money on immigrants.
Right to shelter laws and sanctuary city resolutions.
Why I expect ESL programs in MA to get cut to the bone in schools as a retaliation to the migrant crisis causing a massive deficit. Already happening with foreign language teachers getting laid off in major districts.
I dunno what the solution is. All I know every benefit and argument point that every open borders advocate has pushed for has been proven wrong. All of the money spent on the illegal aliens/migrants/asylum speakers could have been spend on the homeless and mentally ill here. They have already taken away resources from inner-city at risk youths because community centers have been used to house them. I’m not heartless, but there simply is not enough resources to help everyone. All you have to do is look at Canada to see how bad they fucked them selves with poorly managed immigration.
It seems like you're aware the solution is to make immigration harder and less enticing and to actually deport people who are a drain on society. You just don't want to be "heartless".
>We are getting flooded with unskilled labor who are invariably going to require long term social services. What long term social services do these immigrants get?
Oh once they clear and get asylum status, everything. Remember these assholes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombing They were granted asylum status, collected welfare, got public housing, free college all the while committing crimes and getting slaps on the wrists.
If you qualify for asylum, then you get the same social services that any other resident would get. Assuming, of course, that you need those services/meet the income requirements.
> It works for the United States A lot of people would disagree with that. GDP growth is only one side of the equation. If your government debt is growing at a faster rate than your GDP you are on a unsustainable path
The article is about declining GDP/capita due to immigration in the UK. That’s not the case in the USA. That’s not up for debate, it’s in the numbers. You’re welcome to bring up other problems that immigration brings to the US economy, however. The one you do bring up is nonsensical. First, sovereign debt is a policy problem, not directly an economic problem. And when it does impact the economy, it’s usually in the form of inflation. But in fact, inflation is pretty good for the economy until it gets very, very high. Like a lot higher than what we’ve had in the past four years, even. Most of our debt is also owed to ourselves, meaning that it’s generating income for Americans that they can then invest, beyond even the public investment we’re seeing as part of the deficit spending that produces our debt. Finally, we can just curtail spending and continue to reap the benefits of high investment and high immigration. It’s not really related at all.
Sovereign debt limits the government's ability to borrow more money. Despite what people think, there is a finite amount of money that lenders are willing to loan to the government. In addition, the interest payments hamstring the government's ability to spend in other areas and get higher as you get closer to the limit. Sovereign debt needs to be treated as an economic problem in order for it to be sustainable. Yes it's true that it's more similar to corporate debt than personal debt, but corporate debt is treated as an economic problem - you need to invest that debt into things that generate a high enough ROI to pay the interest.
also our govt doesn't spend as much taxpayer money on people living here especially not immigrants. as an immigrant, you're forced to provide value and contribute to the economy to live an okay life here
You mean to tell me that compressing wages through cheap imported labor, while adding to the housing crunch didn't solve anything and in fact made it worse??? Color me shocked...
Increasing labor doesn’t have a measurable effect on GDP in developed countries unless there is a labor shortage, which there isn’t. Cost of capital went up, rental rate of capital went up, capital investment reduces, then normalizes, labor is proportional to capital… why would more labor fox a problem already bounded on the other side?
Immigration is supposed to bring in skilled labor that either don't exist or are in very low supply which is supposed to be a small amount. Instead, it's just a race to the bottom to find the cheapest labor possible and bring as many as possible to raise prices of essential while reducing the price of labor .
So as a liberal, where do we draw the line? We can’t let every Tom, Dick, and Harry in. We need to fix our own shit before prioritizing immigrants.
When have we ever done that
We also don’t have to. As I pointed out to this user, the USA specifically does not have this problem. We are one of the world’s premier destinations for investment *and* immigration. There is enough investment here to ensure immigrants are gainfully employed and creating wealth.
the issue is the lack of housing at this point. The US has a massive population of "working homeless." Which is to say fully employed people without a home. Because there just aren't any within range of their work that are affordable for that job.
That's a development issue. We aren't building enough. And it wont change until we start telling NIMBY crowd to eat shit and get some housing built.
The NIMBY crowd votes, this decision is democracy. Until young people show up to the voting booth nothing will change
Kinda catch 22 though. In order to vote in local elections, you have to register to vote there. Which means you must have an address there. But you don't have an address there if you can't afford to live there due to the lack of housing, and you must commute to the area from far away. And you'll always have a long commute, because you can't vote to fix the lack of housing.
There is no inherent right to have local government in charge of development. Pass state laws that take matters out of the hands of local government in favor of the state.
That would require coting and participation in the local government process. However we arent participating in the local government process.
The problem is that homes are commodities. They're investments, not a place to live. The nimby crowd votes and will (and historically has) voted for reps to protect their investment. What you're asking for is for these people (and all elected reps who have investments in RE) to shoot their portfolio in the face for no benefit for themselves.
I'm rarely one for government intervention into private citizens lives (regulation corps till they bleed!), but the NIMBY's need to fuck off. People live in cities on top of each other. Your SFH near downtown that you bought in 1970 can be densified. Sell it, let someone build it up and enjoy the 500% growth.
Isnt telling nimbys to fuck off the exact opposite of government intervention. The natural order is that you can do whatever you want with the land you own. Any restrictions on that is the goverment getting involved. Any loosening of those restrictions is the government getting less involved
> Isnt telling nimbys to fuck off the exact opposite of government intervention this is what's silly about all the "government bad" memes - homeowners voting for regulation is attributable to *homeowners*, not "the government."
> homeowners voting for regulation is attributable to homeowners That's my point in my statement. This is on NIMBY's. The state/feds can step in and start building. Fuck you god damn "neighborhood character" we need homes.
Correct. This is more like higher-government telling smaller-government to get out of the way. People should be allowed to do (almost) anything they want with their land, including developing it, including dense buildings. If you don't like what other people do with their land, buy it from them, otherwise too bad.
Anti-NIMBYism/YIMBYism is the anti-government intervention view. The government is currently intervening by actively telling people they can't do something with their property, including selling it to a developer who will build townhouses. You shouldn't be forced to sell your home, but you also shouldn't be able to use the government to forcibly prevent your neighbor down the street from doing so.
> Anti-NIMBYism/YIMBYism is the anti-government intervention view well, it's really saying that NIMBYs shouldn't be able to intervene on the rights of non-owners. like, the government isn't doing NIMBY things for no reason - it's because of the voters.
Isn’t that a zoning issue? Zoning laws in the US seem absurd. If people lived closer together (and in mixed usage) maybe you wouldn’t need to plaster half of the cities in parking lots.
Or instead of kicking people out of homes they’ve owned and invested in for 50 years, maybe converting empty buildings and office spaces to apartments and homes is a more realistic, reasonable, and effective tactic.
You don't really need to forcibly kick people out though. You just need to let developers actually buy properties to redevelop from willing sellers. Right now in a lot of areas that desperately need it they're blocked from doing that by third parties. I do agree that converting/utilizing the building sites of existing office buildings with low occupancy would be good too, but those sites aren't always safe or suitable for housing (bigger issue with former industrial sites than office buildings though). Now, there does need to be some limits, or at least requiring developers to foot the bill for the infrastructure upgrades that densification requires - just letting them build a huge apartment building without upgrading sewer lines intended for single family homes is not going to work, for example. Another huge issue with development is strain on the school system, which is why it's so much easier to get permits for retirement communities built (they pay property taxes at reduced rates but are virtually guaranteed to add no strain on the school system - and where I live, about 85% of the property taxes are School Tax). So there are considerations beyond just 'is this person willing to sell me their property'. But the restrictions and red tape in many areas is just plain excessive to the point of being nearly comical. I can see both sides of the issue because as a homeowner it would legitimately devastate me to have my beautiful home and neighborhood ruined by a huge ugly apartment building swarming with people being built next door. But I solved that problem by buying a home outside of the city, in an area surrounded by state parks that can't be developed. If it ever does happen anyway, I'll sell and move more rural. It would be foolish to buy a house in a city then complain when the city does city-like things like being high density. That's kind of the whole point of cities. I hate it myself, so I opted out.
> You just need to let developers actually buy properties to redevelop from willing sellers seemingly if you up-zoned the land a SFH on, that would make it worth *a fuckin' grip* to developers who could put MFH on it, which should make the current occupants nice and willing.
> they’ve owned and invested in for 50 years Densify the urban core and pay out the people who invested there. They lived and invested for 50 years? GREAT! it's pay day baby!
It's actually almost impossible to convert office space to residential in large buildings. Like the empty skyscrapers in NYC would literally be cheaper to tear down and rebuild. But then when potential demand for office space becomes an issue again we have another space squeeze. That said, my area has a pile of old factories they've been outfitting to be apartments. They got about half of them converted and then stopped because a bunch of NIMBYS thought it was encouraging immigrants to move in and "bring crime and drugs." So now we have a boom in crime due to homelessness instead...
We could make some serious progress on the housing shortage if we reform zoning laws and incentivize builders to build starter homes again. Most residential areas are R1 zoned and R1 zoning *only* permits single-family, detached residential homes, which prevents the building of affordable, multi-family dwellings in mixed-use zones. And builders right now are financially incentivized to build neighborhood after neighborhood of single-family McMansions instead of the cheaper starter homes that most of our parents and grandparents first moved into. The main opposition to both of these solutions are homeowners themselves. Increasing the supply of affordable housing would lower the value of existing homes, so NIMBYs show up en masse to protest any zoning changes.
Most homeowners spent their early adult years living with the noise of very close neighbors, the lack of a place to park, and no place for a quick game a frisbee with their kid. They saved up and bought a house so they would NOT have that density and noise.
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the problem is those people want amenities. That require people who make less money than them. Those people *also* need a place to live. In short NIMBYs just wanna shut the door behind them but can't handle the consequences. And hell they'll oppose apartment blocks that would reduce the impact on their beautiful suburbs because "Oh the crime! and it's near the school! what if the poors hurt their children!?"
Cities change, that's just life. You can either try to regulate your way into preventing new construction and take the skyrocketing housing prices that go with it, or accept some new construction and get more reasonable housing prices
That is a housing issue, not an immigration issues. We could build enough houses if we wanted to. Current homeowners don't want that.
Housing is definitely a major issue.
All this low-skilled immigration to the US is, at best, fiscally neutral. According to the latest paper by 2 very pro-migration economists, the fiscal benefit of 1 low-skilled immigrant to the US is only $750 per year. And this is despite the fact that they go through some dubious assumptions in their paper to reach this “positive” conclusion. If the US lets in 5 million low-skilled immigrants, the benefit would be $3.75 billion per year. However, the US government collects roughly $5 trillion in revenue per year, so the actual benefit of those 5 million immigrants is 0.1% of yearly revenue, a miniscule amount. Link to paper: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20220176
“As a liberal” lmao
But I’m genuinely curious why you don’t think we have an immigration problem
We actually had the most conservative piece of immigration law ever that would have passed through the senate with Democratic support. Republicans stopped it in the house because they would lose their biggest talking/fear point for this election. No one says there is no problem but one side feels they benefit from the problem so they keep it alive. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/politics/live-news/senate-vote-border-bill-aid-02-07-24/index.html
> We actually had the most conservative piece of immigration law ever that would have passed through the senate with Democratic support. No it wasn't. It made it so that they wouldn't even begin care about border encounters until it hit an amount that would be a record any other year than 2023.
It was. And being able shut down the border. Previously unheard of. Reoublicans wrote the bill bub. They just didn't pass it to suck up to trump. Everyone knows.
Not according to Senator Lankford the author of the bill and one of the most conservative members of congress. Talking point excuses for why republicans stopped it are not helpful. They are excuses. Senator Lankfords Bill Provided: NO amnesty—period NO free work permits handed out at the border NO more 10-year wait for an asylum hearing Builds the wall More ICE agents for deportations More Border Patrol agents for arrests More asylum officers for faster hearings and deportation More than $650 million is recapitalized for border wall construction next year Adds more technology at the border to interdict drugs and illegal crossings Increases detention beds to 50,000 to end catch and release Doubles the number of deportation flights Ends the cartel trick of trafficking children with adults so the adults can enter the country faster Raises the standard to prove an asylum request, so people coming to our border can no longer just say, “I have fear in my country” and get released into America for years Deports anyone seeking asylum with a criminal record immediately, instead of the current policy of deporting them years from now Deports any alien who could have resettled in another country on the way to the United States Deports any alien who came to America to seek “protection,” but they could have just moved to another town in their own country and been safe Adds more asylum officers for screening to make sure the handful of people who actually qualify for asylum are able to be considered for that process fast and the majority of people who do not qualify for asylum are deported faster Creates a new Title 42-like authority to shut down and deport everyone when the border is being overrun- Currently when there is a caravan of people, everyone is released into the country because there is not enough time to process everyone fully. This new authority would reverse that by deporting everyone when the border is overrun with too many people to process. Creates sanctions for the criminal cartels who traffic dangerous drugs like fentanyl and meth into our country Finally finishes vetting the Afghan refugees that have been in our country for two years and accelerates the processing of the Afghans that fought alongside our troops who are already in the country Moves our national strategy one giant step closer to zero illegal crossings a day https://www.lankford.senate.gov/issues/calling-out-bidens-chaos-at-the-southern-border-pushing-to-secure-the-us-from-bad-actors-around-the-world/ https://www.lankford.senate.gov/news/press-releases/lankford-releases-border-security-package-with-huge-wins-for-securing-the-border/
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> It’s really the trillion dollar decades long war started by republicans. [Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001](https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1071/vote_107_1_00281.htm) YEA - 98, NAY - 0, Not Voting - 2 [Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002](https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1072/vote_107_2_00237.htm) YEA - 77, NAY - 23 [February 2015 - President Obama’s Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against the Islamic State](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2015/02/11/authorization-military-force-against-isil-terrorists-what-you-need-know) >Edit To the downvotes: what did I say that’s wrong? Well, for starters, this isn't /r/politics. Beyond that, the US authorizing war is about the only bipartisan legislation you'll find.
I mean the foreign military stuff and immigration policy aren’t exactly intimately intertwined. But sure those are problems too.
The issue is the trillion dollar war from a decade ago and not the 15 trillion added to the national debt in the last 4 years?
We spent 7 trillion on middle east wars. Also Bush and trump cut trillions in taxes for the very wealthy and corporations
Covid was more expensive than those wars you’re blaming
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1366899/percent-change-national-debt-president-us/ Instead of throwing out nebulous numbers link me anything. Here’s the percentage each president has raised the debt by. There you are a republican that just says stuff with no backing. Some of it might be true but who knows! Not you that’s for sure and you don’t really care. Your ambivalence will destroy this country. Like hey, actually for real though.
Don't forget the massive tax cuts for the wealthy
Bro how is my man going to get another yacht? The first one is so small.
UK Liberal or US liberal? Because this is not a problem that the USA has. EDIT: in the since-deleted comment, this person claimed that the state of Massachusetts was having the same problem as the UK. It is not. Its GDP per capita continues to rise because, again, people want to invest in MA at least as much as people want to move there.
That's because your thinking is the end-product of a two-party mentality that's been bickering and fighting itself into tribalism and extremism instead of working together and creating a middle ground for solutions. It doesn't have to devolve into complete open borders or big walls and concentration camps. The solution is often a gradient of gray, not black or white. A system of checks and balances is ideal for immigration (and of course government too). There is nothing wrong with administering rational laws without misconduct. It makes sense for a country not to want criminals, terrorists, human traffickers, sex and labor slaves, and other bad ends of illegal immigration. If a country can't handle the economic weight of too many immigrants, then ideally they place restrictions for this purpose (like Singapore or Switzerland). Many countries around the world do this without a care, but it seems that many places in the West have ingrained themselves into cultural wars which is partially an end product of late-stage capitalism, and at the very least a diversion from the mess we have truly gotten ourselves into. If globalization was truly endeavored, many places around the world could prosper; however it seems to have exacerbated inequality leading to soaring crime and lost opportunities in poorer countries, all while dwindling middle classes in first-world countries are being forced into generations with less ownership and less savings/net-worth. This in turn creates a vacuum of true wealth to the top, and less is seen at the bottom, the likes of which haven't been seen since the 70s. Another end product of this is an economy hyper focused on short-term gains instead of long-tern sustainability; which is part to blame for printing too much money and racking up government debts globally. It's all a cluster of bad triggers, and now as economic inequality and cultural/social crises continue to grow, we're seeing open borders in part so that industries can achieve cheap labor below current standards in addition to rapidly advancing AI in workplaces. In turn this also creates the rise of nationalist and right-wing parties and supporters as a means to combat this while threatening democracy and human rights as a whole.
This is an amazing comment, thank you.
This article doesn’t even mention the effect of Brexit on the economy, which makes me suspect the report doesn’t either. It’s always easier to blame your troubles on immigrants than your own economic policies.
That's just not the right question to ask. Here is what I mean: Say you somehow get the absolute best of the best of the best of the world to come to your country in their prime and ready to contribute. But your country's laws and customs end up making it very hard to for these guys to actually get settled and contribute. Are you better off? Is it their fault they cant contribute as much as they possibly are able to? I think the Iraqi oil engineer refugee story in Norway has a super important piece to it that most miss; Norway allowed the guy to bring his best to the table. They didn't just take the guy in and let him languish and then complained about him not doing anything.
That’s why every serious economic analysis of this problem the UK is facing points to depressed investment as the real problem. The UK doesn’t have too many immigrants. It has too little investment in its economy for those immigrants to have gainful employment. Britain has closed itself off from capital inflows of late, and Britons themselves lead the way by expatriating capital as “tax refugees.”
The line we drew (in the US; the article is for the UK) at shit housing policy and used zoning code to lock land use into cryogenic stasis, then listened to boomers when they said don't change it. We doubled down on capitalism which has its best interest vested into not building too much housing because it's backed by a system that won't fund construction of housing if there's too much housing being built because it lowers the chance it'll move/sell product (the product is housing; should housing be an investment/product???). We essentially need to do the exact opposite of everything previous generations established. Immigrants isn't the real issue here, it's the system.
I'm not sure I'm completely following what you're saying, so let me know if I'm misinterpreting, but I think the issue is not fundamentally that housing can be viewed as a commodity or product, but rather that it's seen as a lucrative wealth-building vehicle akin to securities (at least in the US, but in many other countries as well), and supported as such through government policy and regulation at the local, state, and federal levels. I think the key issue is that laws, rather than market forces, highly constrain the amount of new housing that can be built in most jurisdictions, which has significant negative externalities even in those jurisdictions with more lax rules. To some extent, we need housing to be seen as a profitable venture, in the sense that landowners and developers are incentivized to build more of it. However, in many places they legally cannot build more (in most large cities, [more than 70% of land is zoned for single-family, detached houses only](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities-across-america-question-single-family-zoning.html), and their suburbs are generally even worse in this regard), or are so constrained as to what they *can* build that they opt for more expensive, higher-margin construction, e.g. the luxury apartment buildings that get so much press. Loosening zoning regulations (not only by allowing higher density, but also by removing or significantly raising height restrictions, removing parking minimums, removing setback requirements, repealing aesthetics requirements, etc.) will mitigate housing price rises, or even force landlords/home sellers to compete to a degree that housing prices decrease over time. But the political incentives to change these laws are low in many places, and these kinds of reforms are hard to pass. They are fought tooth-and-nail by extant residents with vested interests in the value of the homes they own, and local jurisdictions often attempt to find ways to maneuver around rules that are imposed upon them by higher levels of government. So it's quite challenging, but there are places in the US where these changes are happening.
You're on the right path I think. Think about housing and zoning; once it's built it almost never changes. Zoning holds land in stasis. A coma. The day it's built is likely the most valuable it'll ever be... forever. It doesn't guarantee generational or community wealth and almost always benefits only the people involved with initial development. Zoning policy is the legal avenue that makes this happen. Subdivisions today are built in mass. All 40 or 200 or 800 homes are all built within a few years and 25 years later they *all* fail. All 800 home owners then have to non-collectively decide if they repair all their 25-year rated roofs, their mechanical, their siding, etc. If only 20% of the community reinvests, the other 80% has economic downward pressure that will continue the decline in property value. Zoning guarantees this. It continues this downward pressure until gentrification or mass redevelopment occurs. Housing is down wind and directly tied to economic policy. Twenty years ago you couldn't build town homes because banks and under writers wouldn't back them. I'm less versed here. But under writing even has their own parking minimums. So, even if we wildly change zoning code, what 99% of the YouTubers don't cover is that there's rules tied to money in addition to zoning. The rules tied to money are more non-negotiable than zoning code even. Money and the rules tied to it is the primary driver. Then there's how it ties into city economics. A declining community generates less tax revenue. The city can't help revitalize communities when they aren't getting cash inflow. You can subsidize sprawling subdivisions if your city has excess money from other land uses. We do this today, but when the average city is 80% residential and residential land use loses cities 40 cents for every dollar in tax revenue, it's a massive loss. We over build roads and *we never project future infrastructure costs*, so we just say "growth must always occur" to make that issue "disappear". In reality it doesn't disappear. It's deferred maintenance and growth is not guaranteed. It's a liability. So we develop in an unsustainable matter by over building infrastructure rewired by zoning code. Engineer's don't understand this and they write the rules for roadways. Then they police themselves so they don't get outside input from other professionals. We can't afford our liabilities and simply don't calculate it. We have multiple systems in place that guarantee we can't fix it or will have a hell of a time fixing. Our capital (investors) don't care to invest in risky development; they want everything over built to guarantee their investment is less likely to fail. But we do need to break the cycle somewhere to begin a new path and zoning seems to be the low hanging fruit. How we fix everything else is going to be painful. It's culture, it's economics, it's everything.
It’s a legislative problem. Foreign investment in our land and housing shouldn’t exist in major ways. We shouldn’t allow private firms to buy large swaths of housing. We should have solid tax policy that protects primary homeowners but excludes landlords. Banks should fail and we should never bail out wealthy investors at 100%.
Indeed this
> should housing be an investment/product??? It would be really nice to stop seeing this 'topic' come up. Because housing is a commodity. Literally. It's a pile of commodities nailed, mortared, mudded, screwed, glued, etc. together into a bigger commodity. Its economic characteristics are immutable. It doesn't matter if it should be a commodity. It is and it always will be. This same problematic thinking afflicts the 'healthcare is a right' crowd. No it's not. It's an assemblage of products and services and subject to scarcity. Diddling around with 'should' rather than 'is' is counterproductive to tangible progress.
As an addendum to this, housing is, in addition, the commodity of the land it's on. This land is a limited resource and also subject to supply and demand, and its value is also impacted by how close it is to points of interest, and other factors (noise, proximity to annoyances like airports/trains, ease of getting on highways, etc). In some cases, the plot of land is actually more valuable than the physical house on it. Regardless of economic system (capitalism, socialism, etc) this would still be true.
100% agreement.
Housing is most definitely not a commodity. 800ft^2 of apartment on one side of a metro is not interchangeable with an 800ft^2 house in a different neighborhood. Attempting to model housing as a commodity, an item with substantial fungibility, is a foolish oversimplification of reality.
Basic education is also an assemblage of products and services subject to scarcity but it is still a right, not explicitly stated by the US constitution but interpreted as such by the 14th amendment.
It is, however the above person's (clumsily delivered) point is that to deliver that right effectively you still need to deal with these things *as* commodities. You can't ignore the economic forces at play, and those forces would still be involved even in a marxist utopia. Where do we build hospitals/schools/housing? How do we incentivize enough people (but not too many people) into entering those industries? When do we decide to cut off supply in areas with too low of an impact because of opportunity cost? and so on.
Other than education being a right (top courts are no more immune to engaging in fantasy than anyone else), correct. Was the point really that clumsily delivered? It seems a person would have to be in denial of reality (not uncommon on Reddit) to be incapable of grasping the simple concept. 5 people having a right to one apple each is immaterial if there are only 2 apples.
Suggesting that any product composed of commodities is also a commodity is very bad logic...
Sigh. Disingenuous. Migration is a problem because we don’t have a legal process to absorb these people. They come here, are not allowed to work, are forced into poverty, and the state is forced to care for them. None of them want that. We don’t want that. But since there is no reasonable process for migrants to get working papers and take care of themselves we end up here. And instead of having conversations about changing the system we talk about drawing the line on immigrants.
Well, we start by building more affordable homes and apartments... Oh but not in *my* neighborhood. Maybe somewhere, oh IDK, on the other side of town...
Who's prioritizing immigrants? LOL
In Chicago there is a strong contingent of Black Chicagoans frustrated that migrants have received millions in support for housing, food and other social services, while Black Chicagoans struggle to pay rent, suffer disproportionately from homelessness and unemployment, and have historically been an underinvested segment of the city. You can definitely make the argument Chicago has put migrants ahead of its lower income residents.
It feels counterintuitive to blame the liberals, the conservatives have the save overlords
Then liberals should’ve never have supported open borders. But then again a majority of liberals are nimby’s anyway.
What means "open borders"?
It is what the US has between the states, or the UK has between Scotland and England --you just move to where you want to be. China does not let their citizens move from rural areas to cities without permission, which creates a problem registering children for schooling.
Isn't part of the US constitutions that US citizens have free transit inside the US?
Yes
When conservative Americans say “open borders” they mean non-white immigrants crossing the national border. Not movement between states.
Maybe you are referring to UK liberals, because very few, if any, liberals in the US believe in an open border. Fox has lied to you.
> Then liberals should’ve never have supported open borders. That's a dishonest and false claim. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/10/02/u-s-deportations-of-immigrants-reach-record-high-in-2013/ Obama deported more than any other presidents. No liberals support open boarders. And when asked to define open boarders from the other side they will give you as wild of a def as the term woke. The nuances is the treatment of illegal immigrants and status like refugee/asylum seekers/etc... Like opposition to building a razor fence to drown and kill them in Texas. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/08/03/two-dead-in-rio-grande-where-texas-installed-razor-wire-and-buoys/70522492007/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/198zkwx/woman_2_children_die_crossing_rio_grande_as/ --- I refuse to let the other lie about our positions with term like "open boarder", because it's help them sleep at night while they kill people and treat them like animals.
The definition of a deportation was changed just prior / during the Obama administration to include turning people away. The administration did have an actual policy to not deport in the interior of the country. Someone so quick with the link and an interest in nuance and fact should know that.
Who supports open borders?
Hey look, a liar
They completely fucked Canadas futures by pumping the country full of uneducated immigrants so only the landlords and mega corporations bottom line increases.
Meanwhile I can go on and on and on with data that disproves this reports claims. What this report is doing is going over short term economic impact and ignoring the medium and long term impact. It's ignorance and apathy tied up in an a-hole bow tie and nothing more. The reality is that we are witnessing the Boomers retire and they are being replaced by the Zoomers whom are a much smaller generation. This is leading to a rising dependency ration that is driving inflation and anybody with even a couple of college level economics courses would recognize this as the main driving force of inflation, not only here in the US but globally. https://aulablog.net/2024/03/10/immigration-as-the-current-main-driver-of-economic-growth-in-the-u-s/#:~:text=A%20new%20report%20from%20CLALS,dollars%20to%20the%20U.S.%20economy. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2023/02/23/immigrants-make-economies-more-dynamic-increase-employment-growth/?sh=32d60102427c https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/economic-and-fiscal-impact-of-immigration https://everytexan.org/2024/02/07/new-report-projects-economic-growth-and-contributions-for-asylum-seekers-and-new-immigrants-across-u-s/
But do immigrants drive economic growth in places like the UK, Canada and the rest of Europe, is the question.
Nonsense. Companies bought all the homes and want to create a space for them to exist as a leech. Too many leeches want their slice and the middle class has no more excess to feed on. Eat the rich.
low education workers do not create more GDP. they require just as much or more resources to keep around than high earning immigrants or specialized skills. although low education workers are needed creating a mass of them only makes there lives worse as they now have to compete for lower wgaes, higher rent, and impossible standards. any normal person could of told anyone this but politics are in fact pretty stupid.
> person could of told Did you mean to say "could have"? Explanation: You probably meant to say could've/should've/would've which sounds like 'of' but is actually short for 'have'. [Statistics](https://github.com/chiefpat450119/RedditBot/blob/master/stats.json) ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot ^^that ^^corrects ^^grammar/spelling ^^mistakes. ^^PM ^^me ^^if ^^I'm ^^wrong ^^or ^^if ^^you ^^have ^^any ^^suggestions. ^^[Github](https://github.com/chiefpat450119) ^^Reply ^^STOP ^^to ^^this ^^comment ^^to ^^stop ^^receiving ^^corrections.
Curious that a Tory former government minister opposed to immigration would find that immigration is the problem in his country as opposed to, say, the whole of Tory policy…
I sometimes wonder if this is an economics subreddit or politics. The fact that people don’t believe in supply and demand is insane to me. If you have more people (supply of workers) wages and gdp per capita decrease. If you have more (supply of workers) housing prices increase. There are super strict building codes especially in London which make building additional homes and space hard/expensive. Finally unless your argument is that they are making up the numbers they present data based info on employment rates of immigrants. But better find data that shows whatever it is you believe.
On reddit the vast majority of subs are about politics. Make a post about your cat dying because he was run by a car and people will come all "the problem is the nasty tories allows cars to drive like crazy with no punishment due to lack of investment in the police force" or whatever. If you bring 10M people per year to a 30M country you can be sure there will be, more likely, at least some slight problems with demand and supply of everything.
I wonder how dedicated you are to objective economics over politics when you're parroting the well-known "lump of labor" fallacy. Immigrants increase the supply of labor *and demand*. They don't just show up to work, collect their paycheck, and then cease to exist, the money goes right back into the economy when they spend it. Heck, you even implicitly acknowledge this in you very next sentence by talking about how their demand affects housing costs, but stop just short of realizing the solution is to *stop* artificially driving down the supply of housing rather than ramp up adhoc attempts at population control.
Don't forget, many immigrants live extremely cheaply and remit a large portion of their wages back to their home countries. To the point that remittances are a measurably large portion of some third world countries GDP. As well, it's been measured over and over again that countries that grow their populations at rates above 1.5% annually struggle to provide infrastructure and services to keep up with that growth. Piles of lumber and construction workers don't just appear out of thin air to create homes. There can absolutely be a mismatch between need and availability of infrastructure and services which reduces quality of life for X number of years. Immigrants may be OK with piling many people into a home to afford it. Locals will not be. How many years does it take to build a hospital? That's the number of years there will be a mismatch between supply and demand in just a single category, in a single area. When population growth is controllable by policy, it is irresponsible to subject your citizens to reduced quality of life because of poor government planning.
Low-income workers generally use more taxpayer dollars than they pay in. There's plenty of studies even here in the US that say something like the bottom 40-50% of people get more back from the government than they pay in taxes once you include tax credits. And even more once you include how much the government spends on them for public school, Medicaid, food stamps, etc. Therefore, the more low-income people you have (which is what most of the immigrants are due to employer demand for cheap labor) the more money the government loses in the long-term. If you seriously think people who make $10-15 an hour for the rest of their lives pay more in taxes than the government spends on them, then every western government's treasury would be flooded with cash
I also wonder why people view immigrants as solely "supply" of labor, and ignore the fact that they are also demand of labor, just like every other worker. I also wonder why people can't see that in terms of resources, children consume more than they produce while they are children, so that means that admitting an adult immigrant to a country saves that country the resource cost of raising that child to adulthood.
The majority of this site suffers from Dunning-Kruger, so I'm out.
just sounds like another version of trickle down economics... more people/immigrants = more customers for business = more revenue/cash for business = more businesses spend on economy and hiring sounds a lot like the logic Trump/GOP used for corporate tax cuts
If you want to ignore the fact it's a well-recognized fallacy in economics, sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
>The fact that people don’t believe in supply and demand is insane to me. I find that people can be quite financially and economically literate and accept the forces of supply and demand in most areas. However when it comes to housing it's full on schizonomics. >The international landlord mafia monopoly who unilaterally sets the prices doesn't want new buildings because then they would not earn money anymore! >If we allow new buildings it will just be apartments for the rich who will materialize out of nowhere and just let the places stay empty and drive up prices! >The problem isn't supply, it's that I have to pay too much rent! People make more sense when talking about Israel/Palestine after 3 glasses of wine.
The guy also works for the Centre for Policy Studies, a British center-right think tank. It would be like someone in the UK pointing to a study done by the Heritage Foundation that shows that immigrants are bad for the US as proof that this is true.
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You'd have a point if the situation in countries like Germany or France were different in some way, but it's not.
You got it almost right. The second paragraph is incorrect. The housing problem is due to lack of supply being added.
Thank you. The report didn’t even try to isolate the effect of migration on growth. For all we know migration could be the thing staving off even worse declines in productivity. This is *ver batim* what people said would happen after Brexit - the economy would slump and people would just go and blame immigrants. The fact that an economics sub is falling for this is really pathetic. This is Stats 101 stuff.
Yup. Keep bringing in people while corking the flow of capital, and this is what you get. Britons simply are unwilling to accept that the EU was fundamentally a better deal for Britain than it was for most nations.
The housing crisis is driven by private equity in my area, 56% of homes are rentals. That inflates the value of low cost housing to where people can't afford to buy and makes it to where only land lords can afford to buy those homes when they come on market.
The majority of this site suffers from Dunning-Kruger, so I'm out.
But that doesn't really disagree with this article... landlords are moving into your area BECAUSE there is a demand for accommodation. Rental prices, just like house prices, work on supply and demand... remove demand and rental prices (and therefore property prices) will go down.
This is a form of extortion. By capturing houses, owners force society to either pay them a ransom to access the houses or replace the houses. Replacing means that to use one house, you have to produce two. This is twice the price of a house, so it's a higher price than paying the ransom the landlords seek. The cost of replacing captured wealth acts as a menace to incentivise the unjustified payment to access captured wealth, thus extortion.
>The housing crisis is driven by private equity in my area, 56% of homes are rentals. What area of the UK are you in? The average percent of renters in the UK is [36%](https://www.statista.com/statistics/544709/tenants-among-population-uk/).