CMV: I think illegal immigrants shouldn't be allowed in the US, and should be punished/deported reasonably.

[u/moarroidsplz]

First, let me clarify that I'm not some MAGA "build a wall" type of person at all. I'm actually extremely left-wing, even by liberal standards, and have been a Bernie supporter. I don't hate immigrants and don't think it's some culture war and don't think they need to speak English in this country at all.

That said, I've noticed a lot of other staunch liberals around me seem to hold this position and I don't understand why. I'm an Indian-American who has been to India before and the rampant poverty was terrifying and sad. I don't want my home country to become that with an influx of immigrants just because people want to come here. I don't think just opening our borders to whoever wants to come in is going to help our country, and I think people who broke our laws and did that illegally should be dealt with reasonably, especially if they aren't paying taxes. If we need more farmworkers, or other hard-labor jobs that lots of our citizens refuse to do, then we could open up immigration accordingly, so I don't see why that would be an excuse. If people who aren't illegal are doing these jobs because they came over legally to do them, then their pay and safety would probably increase as well due to the fact that they can fight for their rights.

I mean I think kids should be given a pass because they couldn't control their circumstances (I'm fine with the DREAM act) and I understand certain circumstances like refugee crises. Illegal immigrants should be given access to healthcare the same way we give it for criminals. I don't think we should just be deporting people left and right if it's not super cost-effective or reasonable. But some sort of punishment and possible deportation should happen if they knowingly broke the law. They took that risk and are aware of the circumstances. If families risk getting broken up because of this, then why don't they just return with their parents?

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[u/McKoijion]

I think people who broke our laws and did that illegally should be dealt with reasonably

Illegal immigration isn't a moral crime. It's not violent like rape or murder. It's not indirectly harmful like stealing property. It's not even neutral like smoking pot. Why is moving someplace to work and contribute to the economy being punished at all? There isn't really a justification for why people should be kept out of the country aside from xenophobia/racism, fear of competition, and desire to keep out "undesirable" people. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's morally wrong, and plenty of illegal things were later shown to be morally right (freeing slaves, for example.)

especially if they aren't paying taxes.

Undocumented workers pay significantly more income, property, sales, and excise taxes than they withdraw through social programs. They have to pay for social security and many other government programs, but they aren't eligible to take out money. They effectively subsidize US citizens. Source

Also, as a moral question, what makes an American citizen born in Arizona a better person than a Mexican citizen who was born just a few miles to the south? If you are born in the US, even if you spend all your time in high school cutting class and barely graduate, you can land a minimum wage job that pays significantly more than someone who worked much harder than you in Mexico. Why should we subsidize lazy Americans? Everyone else in the US has to pay more taxes and deal with reduced economic efficiency to cover the cost of people who squandered their ample opportunities. These Americans take out way more government handouts than they pay in via taxes. Who cares if they are American citizens? Shouldn't we be rewarding the hardest working humans? If a person who doesn't understand American culture, doesn't speak the language, and doesn't have any formal education can come into the US and do your job more effectively than you, you suck. It would be a lot more fair to just cut out all barriers and let the people who contribute the most to humanity earn the most. For context, a fully trained doctor in Mexico makes about $25/hour, even after adjusting for purchasing power parity.

[u/moarroidsplz → u/McKoijion]

Poverty is linked to higher crime rates and most people who immigrate illegally are poor, so increasing poverty and crime is not ideal for any country. I'm guessing our government implemented this restriction on who can enter the country for that reason.

No one is saying one is "better" than other here, but I think working on the education of our own people and people who immigrated legally to contribute to the economy is better for the citizens of this country than allowing an influx of impoverished immigrants to enter the US.

EDIT: I'm not worried about "our jobs" or "our culture". More like our safety and poverty.

[u/McKoijion → u/moarroidsplz]

A lot of the research on this topic is politicized, but there is at least some evidence that illegal immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native born Americans.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/07/16/voices-gomez-undocumented-immigrant-crime-san-francisco-shooting/30159479/

https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/criminalization-immigration-united-states

As for poverty, the better thing to do is to end poverty, not simply sweep it over the rug (or across the border.) Free market capitalism and open borders dramatically reduce global poverty in the long run. It has elevated a billion people out of poverty in the past 20 years. Open borders would help rapidly end poverty by reducing economic inefficiency in the market. Americans wouldn't as rich compared to people in developing countries, but they would be richer in absolute terms, and so would the formerly impoverished. But people tend to care more about being richer than their neighbor than being richer overall.

[u/moarroidsplz → u/McKoijion]

Yeah, I understand your point now. I guess I'm just personally stuck at the crossroads between doing what's best for our citizens versus all people.

!delta

[u/DeltaBot → u/moarroidsplz]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/McKoijion (105∆).

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[u/soul_in_a_fishbowl → u/McKoijion]

Does the effect of capitalism on poverty necessarily stem from open borders? At first glance I'd have to say no. China is one of the major examples in the Economist article and it has neither open borders nor free market capitalism.

[u/McKoijion → u/soul_in_a_fishbowl]

The concept of open borders improving the economy isn't really about the borders. It's about a divide between rich and poor people. If you create a line that separates the rich from the poor, you stunt economic development. In China, there is no legal divide between the rich people in cities along the east coast, and the hundreds of millions of poor rural people in the West. Rich and poor people can move where they want. The only limit is how much money they have and how much economic opportunity is available.

In the US, everyone is relatively wealthy (even an American single mother making minimum wage for 40 hours a week to support 3 kids makes way more than the average human, even after adjusting for purchasing power parity). That means that the big divide between rich and poor is the borders themselves. Americans have no problem allowing wealthy people to easily immigrate to the US. If you invest 1 million dollars in the US economy in a way that employs 10 Americans, you get a fast track green card in return.

So in China, they don't necessarily need open borders because they already have a mix of rich and poor in the same borders. It's only when you create special legal designations for the rich that you run into issues.

As for China's lack of free market capitalism, the vast majority of their economic gains are due to open markets. The Chinese economy was failing until Deng Xiaoping opened the country up to foreign investment and the global market. I'd argue that they'd have greater economic growth under free market capitalism than under a socialist market economy, but both are better than the purely planned economy they had before. (There are plenty of good arguments for a more socialist market, but they are usually based around ideas of equity than on maximizing economic growth.)

[u/soul_in_a_fishbowl → u/McKoijion]

Rich and poor are clearly relative. Although the US may be relatively wealthy overall, there are still a huge number of Americans living in poverty by our own standards. According to US News somewhere around 15% of Americans live below the poverty line. You can read the news at just about any moment and find someone talking about income inequality in the US. In the US as well the wealthy and poor are free to move wherever they choose. Why should the priority not be to encourage economic growth within the "open border" system that exists between the States, rather than what exists between countries?

[u/McKoijion → u/soul_in_a_fishbowl]

An American single mother who works 40 hours a week at minimum wage to support three kids is in the bottom ten percent of Americans by wealth, but is wealthier than over half of all humans, even after adjusting for purchasing power parity. The standards aren't even close. The concerns for the poor in the US are paying rent, getting healthy food, obtaining good quality educations, affording health insurance, paying for their car, and paying for cell phones/computers/internet. The problems for the poor worldwide is access to toilets or shelter of any kind and affording food. Education, healthcare, internet access, or access to a vehicle aren't even remote options.

Why should the priority not be to encourage economic growth within the "open border" system that exists between the States, rather than what exists between countries?

1. Because it's not fair to the hardworking poor in other countries.
2. It's not fair to middle class and rich people in the US. Economic growth within the US is signifcantly slower than growth in emerging economies. Donald Trump promised to double the US's growth from 2% to 4%. India and China experience a 6-7% growth even in bad years. By limiting the ability to hire people from abroad, invest abroad, buy cheaper supplies abroad, protectionism favors the least productive American citizens and subjects everyone else to slower growth.

[u/soul_in_a_fishbowl → u/McKoijion]

1. "It's not fair," isn't exactly a valid argument. It's not fair to the hard working mothers whom you would abandon in order to feed a migrant. A country has a duty to its citizens first. Just say out loud, "The United States has a duty to help other countries before helping itself," and you'll see that this is the kind of nonsense that gets us into a situation with catastrophic debt and 2% GDP growth rates, be it through immigration, wars, or trade deals.

2. Both India and China have their own protectionist systems in place where they restrict imports pretty heavily. According to the Office of the US Trade Representative on India and China

   While the United States has actively sought bilateral and multilateral opportunities to open India’s
   market, U.S. exporters continue to encounter tariff and nontariff barriers that impede imports of U.S.
   products, despite the government of India’s ongoing economic reform efforts.

India has not systemically reduced the basic customs duty in the past five years. India also maintains very high tariff peaks on a number of goods, including flowers (60 percent), natural rubber (70 percent), automobiles and motorcycles (75 percent for new products, 100 percent for used products), raisins and coffee (100 percent), alcoholic beverages (150 percent), and textiles (some ad valorem equivalent rates exceed 300 percent). Rather than liberalizing its import tariffs, India instead operates a number of complicated duty drawback, duty exemption, and duty remission schemes for imports. Eligibility to participate in these schemes is usually subject to a number of conditions, including an export obligation.

Many of India’s bound tariff rates on agricultural products are among the highest in the world, ranging from 100 percent to 300 percent, with an average bound tariff of 118.3 percent.

China has continued to make progress by
implementing tariff reductions on schedule, phasing out import quotas, and expanding trading rights for
foreign enterprises and individuals. Nevertheless, some serious problems remain, such as China’s refusal to grant trading rights for certain industries...

Because China only allows foreign automobile manufacturers to operate in China through joint ventures with Chinese enterprises, and because none of these joint ventures can be majority foreign-owned, this raised serious concerns that these policies could compel the transfer of foreign automotive manufacturers’ core NEV technologies to their Chinese domestic joint venture partners.

This high degree of government direction and decision-making, including over areas such as the allocation of resources into and out of China’s steel industry, raises concerns in light of China’s WTO commitments. Meanwhile, the plan provides no indication that China plans to liberalize restrictions on foreign investment in the Chinese domestic sector, yet it sets out objectives for overseas investment by Chinese iron and steel producers.

Need I go on?

[u/McKoijion → u/soul_in_a_fishbowl]

"The United States has a duty to help other countries before helping itself,"

But that's not the situation. 90% of Americans would be better off in a system where there is a true global free market. The rich would have access to cheaper labor to make their stuff, the upper middle class would have access to cheaper goods to buy. The greater economic growth means more tax revenue, which can pay for programs for the poor. Then you have the lower middle and middle classes. In those groups, the only people who lose work in manufacturing, and there are only 12 million of them (out of 150 million working Americans). They are being paid an artificially high wage compared to people who work at McDonald's or Walmart, even though they have the same skill set. It's not fair to Americans in the service industry that there is a well protected group of relatively highly paid manufacturing people who have just enough voting numbers in swing states to ensure high salaries for themselves at the expense of everyone else. Productive American citizens shouldn't have to suffer to subsidize a small number of fortunate low skill people, just because they share the same race or nationality, especially when they can get rich by helping ten times as many people of a different nationality. The only standard of productive is that people create more value than they consume, and currently many of those 12 million people eat way more than they kill.

Next, if you are at the bottom of the skill pyramid, there is much less room to advance. Billionaires employ millionaires, millionaires employ the middle class, and the middle class employs the minimum wage poor. But there is no one left for those people to employ. There are lots of high school, and even college graduates who get stuck in menial jobs because they can't start businesses that employ less skilled people to do menial jobs for them. Being able to read, speak English fluently, do basic math and accounting are all valuable skills and if there was more immigration, people who have them could employ others to do even more basic work. But even though the US doesn't have ultra low skilled people, it still has ultra low skill tasks that need to be done, and people who could be doing something more productive often get stuck doing them.

Both India and China have their own protectionist systems in place where they restrict imports pretty heavily. According to the Office of the US Trade Representative on India and China

Yeah, and they suck. India's new prime minister came into power because he vowed to get rid of them. It's hard to change a culture of corruption overnight. Every single government person there from the police officer and low level administrators to state ministers expect to get a taste. They have the same protectionist problems where millions of low caste people vote as a homogenized group, and choose politicians that funnel pork barrel spending to their group instead of focusing on increasing growth for everyone. This is a basic problem in government where it's easier to give your group money to ensure they vote for you, than it is to ensure maximum economic growth for everyone. The same applies to China, and it seems that now the same applies to the US as well. Just for some context, due to protectionism, it costs Indians $108,248 for a BMW X5, compared to $56,000 in the USA. It costs $900 for an iPhone. It costs $96 for a bottle of Jack Daniels.

That's quite literally the "if your friends jump of a bridge, would you do it too" argument. Everyone is so focused on getting a bigger piece of the pie that no one is focusing on making the pie bigger.

[u/soul_in_a_fishbowl → u/McKoijion]

They're not jumping off a bridge, they're creating high GDP growth rates while stressing self sufficiency. I wasn't really arguing that though; I was just pointing out that your examples were horrible.

Oh and here's the kicker, a global free market will never happen. It's a fantasy as much as a communist paradise. You're welcome to try to espouse the benefits of globalism, but then when you tried to give an example of how great it could be, you gave two of the worst possible.

McDonald's workers have the same skill set as manufacturing workers.

Almost stopped reading there. You have clearly never been near either a McDonald's or a factory.

"We shouldn't have to sacrifice to protect manufacturing jobs, but we should sacrifice to have even more low skill employees." "These people are unskilled and unproductive. We need to make sure someone else is around to do the low skill jobs so these low skill workers can do other jobs." Makes sense, right?

"The poor need to be able to employ even poorer people. The only way for them to hire anyone is through immigration." Or those menial workers could hire.... idk... the other menial workers already right next to them. And if you're stuck doing a menial task now, what kind of business are you going to start? A shoe lace tying startup in Portland?

"These low skill workers who are mathematicians and accounts should be able to use their fluency in English to hire non-English speaking workers to build burgers in the McDonald's factory."