Open borders will, at first, cause downward pressure on wages, as the labor pool of workers able and willing to perform work for a lower price grows. The magnitude would be more pronounced than with what we've been currently able to observe with controlled borders, because the article proposes a scenario where welfare and public assistance would readily apply to newcomers too. In fact, there would be a growth in the…
>Because the article proposes a scenario where welfare and public assistance would readily apply to newcomers too.
FTA: “If the worry is that future migrants might not pay their way, why not charge them more for visas, or make them pay extra taxes, or restrict their access to welfare benefits? Such levies could also be used to regulate the flow of migrants, thus avoiding big, sudden surges.”
I don't know if I follow. Are you saying you've travelled to 52 different countries and found that they all exist on the same planet populated by a species devoid of interplanetary travel and that they have set up a system of artificial geographical barriers to control the distribution resources and movement of individuals of the species?
I think they are trying to say we’re all basically the same across all countries, and all of these lines, boundaries and definitions are arbitrarily drawn by others in order to profit off our evolutionary tendency to work together as groups.
This seems to indicate that the borders themselves are an intensional form of profiteering. I see this more as the incremental and accidental process that takes advantage of the peculiarities of geography.
Open borders will, at first, cause downward pressure on wages, as the labor pool of workers able and willing to perform work for a lower price grows. The magnitude would be more pronounced than with what we've been currently able to observe with controlled borders, because the article proposes a scenario where welfare and public assistance would readily apply to newcomers too. In fact, there would be a growth in the…
Open borders will, at first, cause downward pressure on wages, as the labor pool of workers able and willing to perform work for a lower price grows. The magnitude would be more pronounced than with what we've been currently able to observe with controlled borders, because the article proposes a scenario where welfare and public assistance would readily apply to newcomers too. In fact, there would be a growth in the…
I've been thinking a bit about this lately, and I think you could achieve this slowly in the US with an expansion of the visa lottery process.
What's more valuable than raising happy kids? Submitting some paper to arxiv?
> What's more valuable than raising happy kids? Submitting some paper to arxiv? Yes. This world would benefit from having less kids, no doubt. Also less helicopter parents and more science.
Do you have anything to support any of these claims? And how does the number of children I choose to have impact my likelihood of being a "helicopter parent" or my ability to contribute to "more science"?
> Yet did there quality of life increase? You seriously think poor people's quality of life hasn't increased in the last 50 years? Go drive around "working poor" neighborhoods right after Christmas and see how many huge flat-screen TV boxes are curbside waiting for "big trash day" (small hint: a lot) or see how many people don't have smartphones. I would argue that Wallyworld did more to bring up the standard of livi…
I think you confuse the proliferation of techno-toys with quality of life. The same could be said of the proliferation of radio, automobiles, etc.
If they have the disposable income to purchase "techno-toys" then obviously they have the means to support their basic needs.
I'm actually curious what quality of life metric you're judging by that's declined in the last 50 years?
How does that even remotely follow? We're talking about an individual's productivity, not a firm's profitability.
Ask yourself why the company moves its operations to a "low-capital" country. And while you're at it, ask how companies justify that as a boon for the country they're moving to, then reconcile with the original statement.
>Ask yourself why the company moves its operations to a "low-capital" country.
Because migration restrictions prohibit them from hiring those same low-wage workers domestically.
>And while you're at it, ask how companies justify that as a boon for the country they're moving to, then reconcile with the original statement.
Because those companies bring capital with them, increasing capital intensity in the destination country and thus increasing productivity and wealth.
>If the worry is that immigrants will outvote the locals and impose an uncongenial government on them, one solution would be not to let immigrants vote—for five years, ten years or even a lifetime.
This is actually an interesting idea worth thinking about more. If the concern for those on the right is that more immigrants to the US would cause a permanent electoral Blue Wall by flipping Texas in a couple election cycles, and those on the left see economic migration through a humanitarian lens, then re-thinking what Citizenship means and the rules for participating in a democracy could be on the table as part of a compromise. I imagine a sizable percentage predicate their reason on wanting to come to the United States on earning money, not voting in elections (though I could be wrong, but I don't think I am and I doubt this question gets asked to newcomers). The natural reaction to such a proposal would be that we'd be creating tiers of citizens (Native Born vs Full Citizens vs residents or something along those lines). I don't have a problem with that, per se, but I can see how a lot of people would.
As this sort of thinking becomes more and more popular, I wonder how close to some kind of singularity we truly are. If the people of the world are really so eager to transform the planet into a single global monoculture, then some sort of technology-driven unification of all human consciousness can't be too far off. Me, I personally like a world of true diversity, where people of different physical regions are allow…
> Me, I personally like a world of true diversity, where people of different physical regions are allowed to have unique local cultures. I think free movement is likely to amplify culture, not mute it. Right now I have to go through tons of hoops to live in Taiwan. The culture is precisely my aesthetic. I've spent untold hours studying the language. There are lots of Taiwanese-culturally-minded Americans and Dutch an…
Surely the hoops you have to go through to live in Taiwan despite not being a native prevent the country from being overrun by people who are culturally incompatible with the local populace? It sucks you have to go through hoops and can't just fly there and move in tomorrow I guess, but in a world where you could do that, so could I, and I can't speak any Chinese or Taiwanese, I don't know anything about their culture, and my only connection to the country is an aunt who married into the family. What if a bunch of people like myself moved there suddenly for some random reason, and the local culture was essentially eradicated as we altered it to suit our desires? with global open borders, this sort of thing would happen constantly, all over the place, and with the advent of the Internet, most of culture would merge into even more of a ubiquitous monoculture than the world already is.