A world of free movement would be $78T richer

401–402 of 402 posts

Re: A world of free movement would be $78T richer

#401

Post by tom_mellior » Wed, Jun 27, 2018, 9:02 AM UTC

hueving wrote: post #400

tom_mellior wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain please? Immigrants pay into safety nets just like anyone else who pays into them.

Anyone making minimum wage isn't actually paying into safety nets. The massive backlog that would be allowed in with open borders are unskilled laborers that would be making minimum wage (or less illegally).

> Anyone making minimum wage isn't actually paying into safety nets.

Anyone making minimum wage isn't necessarily using the safety nets either (depending on those nets, and how much minimum wage is), so /shrug/.

More to the point, as the original article also points out, we have had this exact natural experiment in the EU with the recent eastward expansions. Almost all poor people in poor countries stayed where they were. The ones that did emigrate to work... do work.

According to EU law, while there is freedom of movement for work (or whatever other purpose, as long as you are self-sufficient), there is no freedom of movement that allows you to go to another EU country and live off benefits. The "flooded by immigrants who live off of benefits without ever having payed into the system" scenario is exluded by law, and this works in practice.

Other countries could easily copy this system while opening their borders.

Re: A world of free movement would be $78T richer

#402

Post by gspetr » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 1:03 PM UTC

gremlinsinc wrote: post #394

gspetr wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> guaranteed basic income (only for citizens) Unsustainable because their children are automatically citizens. You are merely postponing the problem for some 20 years at most.

When they get their own household, they can start collecting gbi, by then hopefully they go to school, and start contributing to society. They will still be paying taxes though regardless, and their parents will still be paying immigrant level taxes, so they would've paid their fair share so their kids could have a better life, that extra income to taxes makes up for a lot. Either way, doctors, lawyers, delivery driv…

So what's stopping poor trailer park whites (at least a significant portion of which have been poor for generations) to become "contributors to society"?

Why do you think illegal/undocumented migrants would do better than those supposedly born into privilege?

Why would they also do better than african americans or hispanics, who are already at least 2nd generation migrants (and most are probably much more "rooted" than that) and are still not doing so hot?

Both them and poor whites are at least native speakers and share the same culture with the majority of the country.

> by then hopefully they go to school, and start contributing to society.

That's a pretty big if. It also assumes a utopian world (or at least an utopian country) that is crime free and that by extension, ethnic criminal organizations also do not exist.

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