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> Gallup, a pollster, estimated in 2013 that ... 42m would move to Britain. That's about 5 London's. Where would these people live? Will cities magically appear from the ground? UK favellas?
I imagine the migrants would get paid by other migrants to build the hypothetical cities. That is the way literally every US city happened after all — well, migrants or their descendants.
Think of how insane a proposal to limit people moving from a state to another in the US would be, how many arguments would be concocted against that, but so many arguments in favour of international restrictions.
I have no doubts that free movement would have drastic positive economic and social effects. What is truly incredible is how adamant people can be to categorize and justify creating rules to prevent other people from moving around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if we ignore that a billion people would migrate in a few months in an attempt to escape poverty. The article specifically discusses this.
Is this the part you're referring to: "Unskilled migrants care for babies or the elderly, thus freeing the native-born to do more lucrative work." Sorry, no, I don't want migrants deeply afflicted with weird cultures left alone with my baby nor my mother.
Let's not.
>One seemingly simple policy could make the world twice as rich as it is: open borders. In this utopian paradise the author describes is he willfully ignoring the fact that different cultures exist? Not all cultures are equal, no matter what the current narrative tells you. This is a terrible, empty article. >If lots of people migrated from war-torn Syria, gangster-plagued Guatemala or chaotic Congo, would they bring…
The article doesn't purport to understand or comprehend cultural differences, it's simply exploring the economic case. It's not call The Culturalist. For an empty article, you've had a very strong reaction to it.
He had a strong reaction because he's tired of these kinds of lies being perpetuated by our media. Everybody knows mass immigration from problematic parts of the world brings a huge burden on the host population.
Did I miss the part where they discuss the economics of having a larger worker pool? like how that would affect existing workers? that seems like an enormous question to not address fully.
i.e. if you had 5 doctors at 500k, and you opened up, maybe you would have 10 doctors at 300k. This is a natural economic progression. Same with software engineers: open borders would definitely have a stark impact on median income, but there would be more startups and more work and more people employed in the sector.
Did I miss the part where they discuss the economics of having a larger worker pool? like how that would affect existing workers? that seems like an enormous question to not address fully.
Plus there is a delicious delirium of every migrant population being equally capable of or inclined to productive work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on the fact that there is finite money for social welfare.
There is also a finite, not infinite, number of people who would require social welfare for some periods of time. So...
It's not about finite vs infinite, it's about the notion that currently "the good social infrastructure" in the first world can cover a small portion of the global population, doesn't have much excess capacity, and is obviously not sufficient to provide a comparable level of life/service/whatever to everyone in the world. Dividing it equally would mean a regression to the global average which is unacceptably low compared to first world standards, so the first world would never accept this.
Open borders == immediate destruction of the low-skilled and unskilled labor market due to oversupply of labor.
I don't think the tech-crowd is a fan of unionization in general.