Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not a propnent of cencorship or loose labeling as nazi etc. too. Identity politics is unfortunately also part of the left, which allows right wing media to manipulate the gullible by mis-portraying the left with dislikeable stereotypes of LGBTQ/communism/violence etc. > we have enough of this So do i. But what to do about it? Having a clear, open and hopefully constructive conversation about > we need to reduce…
It's for similar reasons that frustrate you that I responded like I did: I am so _so_ tired from years and years of bad faith arguments where I will spend a great deal of time and energy to lay out detailed explanations, and the opposite party will respond with minimal energy, preconceived talking points, ignoring all of it. We find ourselves in a prisoner's dilemma when it comes to debates around this topic (and man…
Before I dive into our disagreement and bisect out your vague, irrational counter arguments, I have to point out the biggest point of agreement between us: Migration is not universally required and zero immigration might be possible and stable, given the right utopic circumstances. If we also agree on the related questions, of how these circumstances could the achieved, then you would now why I think the following about immigration and its necessity. Even if you (1) could magically enforce a spiking birth rate from around 1 to above 2.1 and (2) somehow could ignore the societal upheaval this would immediately cause and (3) somehow guarantee the same social upwards mobility to the new generation (which is not a given in capitalism) to fit into your society as perfect in-place replacement of the previous one. Even if your magic wand could do all this, it would still take at least one generation / 25 years to show any effects. When you consider that most socio-political ambitions take even longer to appear in statistics (consider the periods of the demographic transition), then it is clear, that immigration is needed for certainly 50+ years to support your whatsoever less-magical but (perfectly?) effective effort of societal stabilization. No debate here.
Your other reasons against immigration are a conflation of misconceptions and plain biases and thankfully you summarized them in your introduction:
> The host nations' economic, societal and cultural health
> Economy
Economies are no zero-sum games. (I could argue against this myself but lets not bloat the topic too much. This is scientific consensus and my counter argument is merely philosophical.)
When you say "How many _new people_ can we _actually_ take care of without breaking the current economy and/or public services and infrastructure?" You should immediately be prepared for my counter question: How many more people could be served with even more immigration?
That's the point of a positive-sum game, immigrants don't just take away, they contribute too, that's why you need them in the first place. Sure, there are institutional capacities that don't instantly scale with immigration but ... did you notice? The topic just changed! It went from yes/no to immigration, to how much immigration is manageable per time. Taken optimistically, this counter argument is just an administrative one. There is no hard upper bound on food or electricity or all the services you named like hospitals/elderly care/school/kindergarten because all of this scales with your economy too including immigrants.
There is also no debate about the positive effects of immigration on economies. Trust me, not even the tiniest debate.
> Society
I have never heard about a "societal health", is this is a scientific term? Scratch that. I smelled some pseudo-scientific bias here but lets just ignore all that and reach for the meat instead.
> Societal health has to do with things like current crime rates
Are you ready for my counter question? Sitting stable and upright? Sorry for rhetorics, but is immigration tightly coupled to crime rate or are these two independent topics? Meaning, you could have immigration but no crime or crime without immigration? Maybe I still have enough trust of yours to convince you, that there is also no debate to have about the significantly lower crime rates of first generation immigrants compared to natives, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it from the perspective of a migrant. When you leave behind everything and everyone you know for maybe a better future, you have already proven your willingness to sacrifice for that goal and you are grateful for any chance you get, so why risk it.
The followup generations with a migration history adapt to the natives crime rate, which tells you that crime arises from within (from poverty, no debate here too) and the discrepancy between first and followup generations shows that these two topics are not directly related, which means you can solve crime independently from immigration. Your societal health argument appears to be valid and related, but its just not.
> Culture
> Christian in how our unwritten moral and ethical codes guide us
> immigrants of religions with complete counter ethical and moral views
My internal bullshit-meter peaked here. First, whatever "unwritten moral or ethical codes" guide you, I hope then don't pretend to be, or actively try to be, above the law. Any vague identity politics based counter argument is weak, because the law is the only code that matters.
Second, the cultural reference frame you life in and regard as "holy" is not static and not the ultimate source of truth and well being as you position it to be. Let me give you some (weird) examples of how cultures merge as a sample for cultural melting pots.
Catholicism had influence on south (afro) american voodoo, and vice versa. Today, there are voodoo elements in christian masses and even though the catholic church was not pleased, they accepted it eventually. Can you imagine, the catholic church, open for change. Such a beautifully small miracle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastarbeiter
German "Gastarbeiter" are immigrant workers form all over europe, mostly the south like turkey, that were actively attracted to rebuild germany after WW2. Today, their well established offspring is as assimilated and as germany as one can be. Even though, most of them still speak turkish and consider themselves soft muslims, they drink alcohol, some reject immigration and some of them are even candidates for the far right AfD. How utterly ridiculous.
The point here is, you, like many other right wingers don't see the time scales at play here, which is why I said that your cultural frame of reference is not static. You probably only see some "otherness" and your negative bias kicks in, which leads me to:
Third, muslims with "counter ethical and moral views" still have to abide by the law. Like I said, that's the only code that matters. If you'd think, eg. celebrating christmas is an indispensable pillar of civilization, you'd directly prove my point of identity political bias blurring your mind.
So what contradiction are you talking about?! Here comes the bullshit part. Whatever muslim morals/ethics being incompatible with christianity is irrelevant if your only basis of morale and ethics is the law, which should be agnostic to any religion. So many religiots conflate their believe as the only source of morale/ethics, which is just dumb, an exceptional insult when you give it a second thought and a perfect excuse for violence, if you have exclusive morale and any other has by definition not.
> If you find what I've written so far to be entirely unreasonable then I'll save us both the time and energy by stopping here
You are so certain huh? So absolutely sure that no one could ever debunk your solid world view. Yet, I just did take my 3 hours of time to address it piece by piece. So tell me, how do you feel right now? Could you pin point my arguments weaknesses the moment your read them or is your mind still searching? Maybe in cognitive dissonance?
Do we have a debate or was this yet another monologue, I had so many of in the past?
To end and summarize this on a constructive note: Social mobility is a key element for social cohesion (and integration), which is independent from ethnicity. The problems you see are real but other, lesser fortunate people are not the ones who build this global system and are not the only reason your national problems emerged or increase, if anything, the opposite is true. I am not saying that migration is easy to manage or tolerating other cultures plesant, but don't reduce it to only that, be open.