Re point (5), the "gang of eight" bill would've been the de facto process (illegally entering, having children or marrying, attempting to bring family over via chain migration) the de jure one via advertising to the rest of the word that violating US immigration law does not matter. We ended up running an experiment over the course of the last 4 years to see what that looks like and the results are grim.
>There are simply too many people who have strong opinions and yet believe untrue things about American immigration.
You appear to be operating from a different premise than people who are skeptical of past efforts to "reform" immigration law. "Permanent legal mass migration" is not the bargain the country wants to make, and thus far every attempt to "reform" immigration operates from that initial premise.
Define grim? Surging stock market, reduced inflation? 4% of the global population producing 75% of Nobel prizes ( half of which are immigrants), robust high tech manufacturing? Robust agriculture that was recovered from the first round of tariffs? Increased housing stock stabilizing prices? The Chips act and infrastructure bill that would have accelerated strategic manufacturing growth? Clean energy investments that would have given us more power for AI.
These are all things that sound great to a religious listener of Ezra Klein’s podcast but normal people either don’t know about them, don’t care about them, or disagree with them.
I don’t think we should make policy specifically to cater to the part of a voting constituency (the willingly ignorant) who doesn’t know about the factual benefits of a large incoming immigration policy.
Policy should be made to cater to factual objective reality, not to make people feel better.
Ezra Klein isn’t for the unwashed masses. He’s not even interesting to the average Democrat. His content is specifically for people who care about boring facts and policy. Obviously MMA and WWE fans and crude comedian fans will respond more to show of force, peacocking, and loud brash speeches. These things are vapid when it comes to politics. They only serve to elect Dark Triad figures, not good policy makers.
The problem with immigration is that we need it (just to maintain replacement rates and economic growth), but the average American voter says they don’t want it.
Also worth pointing out that it’s likely that Democrats didn’t move on securing the border earlier in Biden’s term because all of the people criticizing Biden’s immigration policy were crying wolf for years or decades before it actually became a huge problem.
Well, I agree with you (sort of), but democracy lacks a solution for this problem (ignorant people existing and voting). Unless you are going to give everyone an IQ test before they register to vote or some other means to test some "eligibility" dimension it doesn't seem solvable, since those options are non-starters in western democracies.
>The problem with immigration is that we need it (just to maintain replacement rates and economic growth), but the average American voter says they don’t want it.
What would be helpful here is if people who state this so plainly as a matter of fact actually took the time to interrogate why they think that way. I don't think this statement is true, quite the opposite. You are sort of hinting at the real problem in your parenthetical, not sure if you were intentional in that regard. One should probably determine why the birthrate in a particular nation is below replacement before concluding that the only solution is "infinity immigration". Moreover, economic growth is not the end-all-be-all of a country, since these are places with history and a people in them and not a "special economic zone" there the only reason anyone lives there is to conduct economic activity.
Counter argument to what? You posted a list of things that look like a copy/pasta from last year's campaign trail. Unrelated to my point, only true at the margins.
Was inflation falling and the lowest in the OECD. Yes
I am not going to go point by point. And they aren’t “true at the margins” when taken together as a whole. They are a manifestation of a broad policy that created improved conditions in the country that would have continued. And the CHIPS act was the exact policy to set us in the course for how the world will be over the next 30 years rather than what it was 60 years ago.
This is a really bizarre claim to make. Are you claiming that the United States is, idk, forgetting how to farm and so we have to do mass immigration to bring in people who remember how? It also flies in the face of historical facts, like how the United States gained its status as an industrial powerhouse when immigration was at its lowest point in its history.
It’s not about knowledge. It’s about having people willing to use their strong backs.
Very few agricultural products are harvestable without the use of hands at the current prices. And when states have cracked down on illegal immigrants, farmers cry bloody murder that native-born Americans can’t last 1-2 days doing that work. American living standards are FAR higher than those of the people who are willing to work agricultural fields.
Okay. Then build robots to do it. Have you thought for a second about why these robots don't already exist? Perhaps it has something to do with available cheap labor. Really really strange to see a pro-immigration argument that amounts to "Big Ag needs their slave labor".
There wasn't even a single, popular vacuum robot with less then 7% one star ratings (complaints with valid utter failure).
How naïve must one be to expect decent robots for farming. And those very soon?
Do you believe in Santa? Or Tesla FSD?
A little difficult to parse your comment, but I think you're calling me naïve for asking the tech community on a message board for the incubator that has backed and does back the some of the most successful tech startups ever to think a little more deeply about how to solve these kinds of problems with technology. Wherein I posit that one of the reasons this tech community seemingly lacks interest - and surely the difficulty of the problem is also one of those reasons - is the availability of cheap labor, resulting in a weak argument for funding this kind of venture.
I'm not against automation. I'm against the interruption of the food supply chain.
I don't won't the US to see a lot of pitchfork in use -- and that wouldn't be for farming.
I agree that (slave like) misuse of cheap labor is a problem.
We have a similar issue here. (Bad cleaning, by badly payed, overworked cleaners).
I'm a bit angry because I looked into fixing it by (partially) automating it, but the supply chains are rather bad. The currently available mainstream robots (Dreame, Roborock) are not up to the task (no proper support in Europe).
The only interesting option seems to be cleanfix from Switzerland.
To make things short: that anger shouldn't have targeted you, because it boils down to my own current incompetence to fix a real problem.
Sorry!
Robots did my dad's knee replacement surgery. I don't think this argument holds water anymore. Maybe if you make your claim more precise: delicate + scale. But, if that's the case, the scale problem is solved with money.
Lots of teleoperated stuff in the medical world. That's not the same as robots. There's still a skilled hand at the controls making the medical decisions.
Chinese dark factories aren’t harvesting bruisable fruits and veggies. Dark factories are specifically selected for tasks that are easily automated with extremely high precision. Most of agriculture isn’t.
In some places Chinese labor is at price parity. However the reasons why China has dark factories is government investment and an abundance of mechatronics engineers.
People build factories in China because all the other factories are in China just down the road.
None of this contradicts my previous comment though. We don't invest in automation because we have cheap labor. China is an aging society with a shrinking workforce. Here we have cheap labor and offload the cost to the taxpayer. Illegal immigration is just another part of corporate welfare which is why socialists like Bernie sanders used to be against it.
Your counter argument clearly cuts against your initial argument. Low wages isn’t preventing automation. It’s lack of an ecosystem of similar suppliers, lack of highly trained talent and lack of government and market investment.
Liberals aren’t against immigration because it is corporate welfare but because of the strain it places on the social safety net and effects on jobs but both of those could be overcome with a rational policy on special economic zones.
>There are simply too many people who have strong opinions and yet believe untrue things about American immigration.
You appear to be operating from a different premise than people who are skeptical of past efforts to "reform" immigration law. "Permanent legal mass migration" is not the bargain the country wants to make, and thus far every attempt to "reform" immigration operates from that initial premise.