Immigration, World Poverty and Gumballs

You didn't answer the question clearly. It seems your answer obliquely is that you don't want it for yourself, you want it because it'd benefit the immigrants. >They don't bite. I grew up in a class of around 50% children of immigrants. I'm aware that they don't bite. But, it's nice of you to instantly assume that I'm a xenophobic person just because I question your policy ideas on immigration. Of course the person who wants 20x immigration would assume the same thing about you, and then you're in the left-wing purity spiral. So let's just leave off the insinuations of personal flaws, okay? >the target should be, if someone wants to come here and make a better life for themselves, they should be able to. Please, please watch this 6 minute TED-style talk on immigration numbers: ▶ this video Your basic goal of helping the world is good. But your convictions have completely disconnected you from the strictures of reality. Your goal isn't coherent. If your target is 5x immigration, then you're not even close to your stated goal of accepting everyone who wants to come. 5x immigration would be about 5 million per year. Africa alone adds 30 million people per year via births over deaths. If 1/3 of those want to enter, then you haven't even absorbed most of the population growth of one continent, much less helped existing Africans, or anyone from anywhere else. The entire Western world (USA, Canada, Australia, Europe) is about 15% of the world population. It is simply impossible that 15%

Your points have all been addressed before. See this presentation about the growth in population in 3rd world countries and how immigration is completely incapable of addressing it in any meaningful way -- ▶ this video The growth rates and population amounts are simply too high for us to effectively solve the problems of population growth with massive, intercontinental migration. You also can't solve societal and cultural problems (of which the 3rd world and developing world has many) by massive migrations of those populations into first world countries. In effect, you end up simply importing those problems. There's plenty of history and evidence for this. There's never been a case in history where the population of a society is massively overtaken by foreigners and that society hasn't changed dramatically. Cultures and societies are not interchangeable. They aren't equal. It's not racist to say this. You can find undesirable beliefs and traditions among all races and cultures. You cannot fix problematic cultures and societies by trying to emigrate people out of those societies faster than they can produce them. It's far easier to import and export ideas and cultures than it is to migrate people.

He cannot, except some feel-good and virtue signalling slogans. The resources for social support in most developed countries are limited even for their own citizens; taking anyone would quickly overwhelm the system, that's a basic math, even without a napkin. For people, who do not have a good visualisation skills for numbers, there's this video: ▶ this video The point is, if you want to help the people in the rest of the world, you have to help them in their countries , which I wholeheartedly agree.

Someone else on HN commented that the poor need to stop reproducing in order to improve equality. At first I found the comment kind of troubling, but the more I think about it the more it seems to make sense. Watching this video kind of backs up the point to a degree, even though the topic is immigration. ▶ this video Can someone come back with a decent counterargument? I haven't been able to yet. (It's worth remembering that a good percentage of people reading this will be in the top 1% despite not being "rich" by western standards).

No, letting in refugees is 100% political pandering. Explained with gumbals: ▶ this video Immigration drives innovation, tolerance, advancement of the arts, and fuels small business. But let's stop fooling ourselves that relocating people halfway across the world is solving any sort of crisis.

It may just be that asylum for purely economic reasons doesn't scale in a way that would solve the problem. This video does a good job of showing that: ▶ this video

This video, although speaking only about allowing unrestricted immigration to the US, is worth watching for perspective. ▶ this video Unrestricted immigration would make the West's social safety nets and healthcare impossible to maintain. There would be corresponding civil unrest as a reaction. The obvious first thing to do about world poverty is provide free birth control and related education.

(To the flagged commenters Bostonian and devoply) You're both wrong. With non-citizens already in our midst responsible for crime waves, some domestic surveillance may be a regrettable but necessary but is still A Bad Idea. And likewise, open unchecked borders are a mistake, and the treatment of children is way overblown and misrepresented. Obama never performed DNA testing to find the obvious child buyers. Here is context of Trump's tweet about the Fabulous Four, 1. "Why don’t they go back" 2. "and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came" 3. "Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly..." How many of your chosen news sources and celebs are only quoting #1? How many have consistently failed to quote #1,2,3? Is it 'racist' to tell people to go, then come back and show us how it's done? THIS is why open unchecked borders is a bad idea for the most desirable developed countries, ▶ this video

▶ this video That's only tangentially involved in this discussion though. That video is about whether opening immigration pathways to the USA can reduce world poverty. I never reviewed the rules that are being overturned here, so I can't say whether they made sense or not, but they were probably targeted at increasing US economic growth, not reducing world poverty.

"But what America did was a basic human obligation. It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks. It is your duty to answer us, even if we don’t give you sugary success stories. Even if we remain a bunch of ordinary Iranians, sometimes bitter or confused. Even if the country gets overcrowded and you have to give up your luxuries, and we set up ugly little lives around the corner, marring your view. If we need a lot of help and local services, if your taxes rise and your street begins to look and feel strange and everything smells like turmeric and tamarind paste, and your favourite shop is replaced by a halal butcher, your schoolyard chatter becoming ching-chongese and phlegmy “kh”s and “gh”s, and even if, after all that, we don’t spend the rest of our days in grateful ecstasy, atoning for our need." If you accept the premise that the west should accept immigrants to help them, there'd be hardly any fewer in need of help, while her example of what the west would look like is exactly what would happen, and is happening: ▶ this video Fortunately westerners have very low population growth, so they leave plenty of room for new arrivals.

You are delusional. Two separate congressional commissions in the 70s and the 90s concluded the long term sustainable population of the USA is under 200 million. Moving people from poor places to rich places increases the environmental impacts. link Anyway, "moving people around" is not a useful way to look at American immigration. The numbers of people overseas who would move here are effectively infinite. ▶ this video

"3. It's quite frankly inhumane in many cases to send these students packing. Even in the relative squalor that they endure living, for example in Los Angeles on mere hundreds of dollars a month, they still want to live here and create a family here." And what of the billions of people in the world who are even worse off? ▶ this video