- cross-posted to:
- neoliberal@lemmy.world
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- neoliberal@lemmy.world
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Decades of talkings heads offering an explanation for rural decline, that’s how. Look back to Rush Limbaugh and his predecessors.
The irony is rampant immigration (and our tolerance to it) was an economic miracle for the US, an envy of the world. We’d be facing a population cliff like S Korea, Japan, China or Russia without it. But now that’s coming for us too :(
Definitely a misdirect from the corporate takeover of everything.
I grew up in a shitty small rural town, but while I was in high school I watched the shitty “mom and pop” stores slowly disappear and the local factory vote against unionization only to be closed a few years after I moved away. You know what immediately moved in to fill the void? Wal-Mart and Dollar General.
My dad was so focused on immigrants taking his job and other insane republican economic talking points that he lost that job when the company decided it wasn’t cost effective to operate in the US anymore.
You must have lived down the street from me. We had a few mom and pop joints, two local restaurants, and “the plant”. They didn’t get Walmart but now they’ve got the world’s worst Dairy Queen, the world’s second worst Sonic, and two different brands of dollar store.
TBH some of the points were right. Democrats took big bucks from corporations too, especially Big Tech and basically anything focused in metros.
And it was also a distraction.
Rural folks should have voted differently, yeah, but it was an easy trap to fall into. I blame propagandists and cowards taking money, not them.
The “population cliff” is a made up boogeyman for capitalists. That’s because they’ve relied on population growth for market growth. What’s the harm in population stagnation or even decline?
And I don’t want to hear about young people supporting aging populations. That’s a man-made problem that has solutions. Just not the kind of solutions capitalists can abide. (and if you think about it, it’s a temporary issue anyway).
And I don’t want to hear about young people supporting aging populations. That’s a man-made problem that has solutions.
Well, okay. I have a bridge to sell you.
Look. Everything is a “man made” issue with solutions.
It doesn’t matter what economic system we want or have; fact is something has to put a ton of work into taking care of old folks, unless you kill them off or let them rot. Hope and ideology isn’t going to fix one’s body/mind, and that has nothing to do with capitalism.
…Will we automate the problem away some day, WallE/Star Trek style? Sure. That’s the goal. But we aren’t close to there yet. Overloading the young taking care of the old IS our short term problem, and we have plenty of land to support a growing population with room for expanding conservation, as long as we don’t do stupid shit like ranch excessively and expand oil. Then we can level off the population. But we can’t do any of that if entire counties collapse from the pressure/burden of support.
But okay. Let’s say tomorrow, every country on the planet rises up, abandons capitalism, and embraces cooperative economics, with a magic snap of the fingers. That’d be great.
But we continue to let populations in developed countries age.
Then what?
How does that change the needs of elderly folks at all? How does that change the math of young people needing to devote more and more of their energy to them?
Reducing overconsumption and overproduction will help a ton. We do not need nearly as much stuff as we are currently consuming. In addition, there are a lot of jobs these days that are just… not necessary. Take advertising for example, or all the job positions that are all about how to fuck over the consumers the most, then all the energy and work into fixing it or counteracting it, everything that is done not because it’s efficient, but because it’s profitable
We are far far more productive today than we ever were before in human history. It’s all about prioritization
I wouldn’t make that generalization.
We aren’t even close to post-scarcity in, say, healthcare. Keeping people alive and healthy is expensive and labor/education intense, even without the current structural inefficiencies.
Distributing healthy food is not trivial either, which ties into that.
You also shouldn’t overlook just how much is done because it’s profitable, and not efficient, though
The simple example is of course enshittifying services. But it’s also things like making 30 different versions of chips and candy and so on while putting lots of resources into preventing local homeless people from stealing any of the food they need for survival. Investing lots of research in making hyper-palatable foods that are addicting instead of how to make more efficient logistics towards everyone.
And then there’s of course the part where it being a competitive system means stopping others from making use of your research/effort and sharing things, because that means more and stronger competition, which leads to doubling of efforts and so on…
And I mean, I could go on, but the point is that, if you look closely enough, you’ll start seeing this everywhere. Inefficiencies made in the name of competition and profit seeking, not what is actually good for society and would be considered a job done well. A restructuring of society would help massively. From paying medical specialists more and making their jobs more tolerable instead of squeezing as much profit as possible, to opening up more human resources from other areas of society which could in theory help out more either directly or in the peripherals
We are massively massively more productive today than in the past. There is no excuse
And yeah, of course it isn’t the be-all end-all. But I would argue it would help more than it might seem on the surface. Directing resources towards where they are needed, and not just where they are profitable
Keeping people alive and providing healthy food is not as expensive as it’s made out to be. Socialism for the wealthy, now that’s expensive! Elon Musk could feed the entire world three times over! And there are lots of solutions, money just doesn’t back them.
For example, Holland had two issues. College students didn’t have places to live or couldn’t afford places, and they didn’t have enough people taking care of the elderly. So they put them together, the students have a place to live and the elderly are being taken care of. It was just something they tried and the results were spectacular!
The problem in the states is that we don’t even TRY ANYTHING! We have more resources than smaller countries and we don’t even try. We could try 50 different solutions in 50 different states, use the scientific method to measure the results, and then implement the methods that worked. We could even try thousands of different solutions by trying different methods in different counties of each state. But instead, we CHOOSE to continue to argue and bicker between ourselves. What a waste of time and energy!
I agree that the capitalists economy is a complete scam. Americans are so used to having so much land, that we just continue to shit up as much as we want and then move on to shit up another area. The earth cannot support continued population growth, especially with climate change. And even America will eventually run out of land to shit on. Other smaller countries have to respect what land they have and how to use because it’s limited. We could learn a thing or two from these smaller countries.
In France we have the “30 glorieuses”, 30 years of unprecedented economical growth. Guess who came and worked tirelessly to make it happen? And guess who waxes poetic about this blessed moment in time?
Of course the difference is that at the time, the immigrants lived in slums outside major cities, and they knew their place if you catch my drift.
Population decline has little to nothing to do with immigration. It’s just affordability. Anytime the lower and middle classes (most of the population) are doing well, people have more kids.
Easy.
There is a huge portion of the country, about 1/3, that knows they aren’t living the American dream, but they work hard and don’t understand why.
Then, someone tells them something slightly true. That there’s not enough pie to go around (semi-true), and that the reason there’s not enough pie is all the immigrants and freeloaders who aren’t working and are taking handouts (false).
What they aren’t told is there could be enough pie to go around, if the top 1% was willing to share. They aren’t. And they now control ~35% of wealth in the USA.
And then the top 1% uses that extra capital to tell that 1/3 of people that their Hispanic neighbor is the problem.
a big chunk of that bloc is first gen immigrants themselves.
all my 2nd gen immigrant friends have parents who hate new immigrants and support ICE type policies and are big Trump fans.
First gen immigrants are affected by new immigrants, they’re in direct competition with the new guys and many are quite happy to pull up the ladder.
If that was all that was going on, it would be pretty understandable for that subset.
What I don’t get are the white ones with first gen immigrant partners.
most of the immigrant women I have dated wanted a conservative white guy boyfriend. probably because they were looking for a guy like their dad.
If magas could read a post this long they might get it
Not a chance.
People hardly ever bring up how any company that knowingly hires illegal immigrants should be fined out of business. But of course it’s the workers that must face the consequences.
companies create jobs. creating jobs is political currency for representatives.
workers don’t create jobs, they take them.
Well you see, they are coming here to steal all our jobs but they are also jobless losers stealing all our welfare
Alas. Will no one spare one word of prayer for the cats and the dogs of the people that live there that the immigrants are also eating
These are the same people who were simultaneously protesting “Stop the count” and “count the votes” on election day in 2020.
Reagan was an evil genius with the “welfare queen” branding.
Hateful branding is always easier than inclusive branding. Just think about how many different words Americans have historically used for black people: all “they” have to do to turn a positive term into a slur is to say it with a sneer.
Don’t forget that they stick to themselves and form parallel communities while also stealing our wives
I had a pretty funny discussion where someone was like “they’re bussing them in so they vote democrat!” And I was like, but they’re not registered to vote. “Well the democrats want to change that.” But most immigrants lean heavily republican, and are anti immigration as well, sort of a pull up the ladder behind you thing. “Well because even they know what the democrats are doing is stupid!”
And then 5 minutes later they’re saying the first line, when they just agreed the exact opposite is true… it’s like the facts are only true if it supports the argument that they’re making at that exact instant
They operate on feelings, not facts. This is a common and true trope about conservatives.
it’s entirely true of liberals, and anarchists, and communists, and fascists.
turns out it’s a trait of human beings of any belief system. facts and complexities of reality tend to outside the simplistic grasp of most beliefs.
Both sides! You are hilarious 😂 thanks for that.
last time i checked both sides were full of people.
or are we letting robots vote now?
Well, large tech corporations often cut costs by falsely listing impossible to meet job descriptions and then use that to ask the government for an excuse to hire a foreign worker, who they will hire despite not meeting the job descriptions either, but is willing to work for a fraction of what the domestic worker can afford to live on.
So there is that
But that’s not the fault of those immigrants, who are just looking for a better opportunity; that’s on the corporations abusing a system that is supposed to improve the domestic economy by bringing in top talent to American industry, not by displacing domestic employees and depressing wages.
And uh, also, the conservative wing and the administration isn’t really upset about that at all, either.
They have to look at brown people
That was almost literally what the german chancellor recently said. Roughly translated: we already deported a lot of people but we still have this problem with “how it looks in the cities” (Stadtbild).
Most of the things people listed in this comment section isn’t a problem with immigration, but a problem with greedy rich people. Immigrants just get falsely labeled with these problems. Chop off the heads of the rich along with their entire bloodline and we’d have a lot less issues.
- They are willing to work for less than a normal American living wage. This reduces the amount that an American can work for for the same job. Globalists love this.
- They bring and establish a different culture eroding a way of life that is considered American.
Those are two things I think someone might say about immigrants. Additionally, there’s general disdain for the poor and many immigrants come here to escape worse poverty.
In some instances, particularly in the American South and in some European cities, a large influx of immigrants has proven disruptive to local culture as well.
But as the son of a roofer, I can confirm, #1 has historically been an issue. My dad’s business, when he was still able to roof houses, was often undercut by illegal crews giving lower bids.
Of course the answer is a legit path to citizenship and resources to help people assimilate more easily and without fear, not Gestapo shit, but immigration, like abortion, is an issue that is purposely never resolved, and it never will be. This is a golden goose issue for Republicans, just like abortion is a golden goose issue for Democrats. They simply make too much money in donations and are able to grift all the public money they want in order to pretend it’s being solved, and therefore, have no real motivation to fix it.
Yes, immigrants drive down wages is the biggest issue. The second is if you bring in a large enough glut of 1 type of immigrant all at once (like refugees for a real world example) they can establish an insulated community and not actually join “the mixing pot.”
There are obviously a lot of positives and neutral points as well, but everything has a give and take. The biggest positive is that children are a pure drain on society but an immigrant doesn’t need schooling or rearing. They can simply begin working (for that lowered wage).
This is less of an issue in America than it is in Europe, and I think it comes down to religion. The immigrants to the United States are generally more likely to adjust and conform since American culture is highly syncretic, and refugees are more likely to be Christian and meld into the predominantly Christian Unites States.
European immigrants are more likely to be Muslim, which clashes with European customs, cultures, and ideals. This is why they form such tight, insular communities where they can control the communities customs and ideals. You see this in Muslim and Jewish communities in the United States as well but it is less pronounced.
it’s also true in both cases that after the third generation the insularity disappears, outside of extremist groups, like hasidics, etc. most children of who came to Germany in the 1970s are now more or less integrated and fully german because they have been there for generations. Just like Italians and Irish in America. I’m a third generation immigrant and i’m fully integrated, whereas my grandparents very much were not as integrated and saw themselves as irish/italian more than american.
but that takes 50+ years.
There is plenty of evidence that driving down wages is not true.
https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116727/documents/HHRG-118-JU01-20240111-SD013.pdf
also, the simple fact that more people looking for somewhere to live means less accessibility to that housing if supply is fixed
When has the housing supply ever been fixed, though? It’s always growing, and it should always be driven by demand.
fixed how? it’s been artificially restricted for 50+ years now, because people want values to go up.
those restrictions didn’t exist in the 1970s and prior.
In an ideal world it should. But in reality the demand can rapidly outpace the growth.
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/1c9138dc24064b2e8142ff156345a719
New York added 33,000 homes in 2024 and gave permits for 15,000 new ones but you still see extremely low vacancy rates and high demand outpacing these constructions.
https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-new-york-citys-housing-supply-challenge/
Well that’s fair enough for the larger point, at least within NY. I guess I was mostly reacting to the notion of “fixed”, mathematically speaking.
The supply is “fixed” by the people who already have a big pile of cookies. Fight them, not the dude trying for a better life for his kids
yep. housing hoarders disgust me
3- housing and rents go up in every city with more migrants because it’s workers who just want to rent now right here at any cost compared to a city where people settle in owned houses.
4- they sent most of their earnings outside to their countries to help their families there compared to citizens who pay it all on their local economy. and if they were illegal, not even pay taxes while using and benefiting from most your services. However, the true leechers who pay no taxes are in fact the super wealthy.
In a broader picture again, it’s actually corporations and property owners who benifit the most from illegals or cheap migrant B-visa workers, and crowded cities and higher rents and housings. So ironically the rich are the ones who benefit from immegrants the most specially in areas with high local unemployments and low wages. Then they use the narrative that these dirty unassimilated immigrants who dont speak your language or share your culture are ruining your city to distract the blame from them.
There’s also the fact that whether or not the undocumented are illegally voting in national elections, states currently receive representation in Congress based on their total population, not citizen population. Which is a strong motivator for blue sanctuary states and cities to want open borders, and for conservatives to push for legal deportations. This is a power struggle.
Because any kind of minority is inferior to white straight people and they’re the reason for every ill in the world today.
It’s truly just racism. It’s worked for 4000 years, since the establishment of civilizations.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” - LBJ
My favorite is when MAGAts claim immigrants are taking our jobs, while also claiming immigrants are sucking off the government teat getting free rent, healthcare ect because they are too lazy to work. Schrödinger’s immigrant.
Never forget that many of the the biggest MAGA bootlickers have their income subsidized by the government…
Red states boast cheaper… everything, because they get money from all the blue states. Buncha welfare queens.
It’s one of the better reasons why a national divorce from the blue states and red states sounds like a better and better idea each and every day into this administration.
Not every blue state is a net contributor. Vermont and Maine don’t deserve that fate
Vermont at least has a cool progressive city that elected Bernie Sanders for mayer 3 times before becoming a senator, and Graham Platner is a progressive, rockstar senate candidate in Maine, so there’s some redeemability there IMO. The real zit to pop in the northeast would be New Fucking Hampshire.
It’d be a pain in the ass to workout a divorce, but I think it’d be a whole lot easier than dealing with the fucking deathtrap we’re heading into. Not to mention some redemption on the global stage for better relationships with our virtually former allies? “See, we are not with those fucking assholes! And we got all the money!”
I live in a blue state and while I definitely do not want to live in a dictatorship, I am also not ok with abandoning the impoverished in the red states to that either. Just because the government of the red states are idiots doesn’t mean the population is worthy to be sacrificed.
I’d be in agreement with you before the 2024 election when I still some semblance of a belief in bipartisan left. But now, not so much; I learned that Republicans / MAGA are in a fascist death cult, and are in fact demons that we share the country with.
But common, we’re not demons. There’d are red state refugees that’d make great blue state people whom we can take in.
The other major problem with this idea though is that the state with the most Republicans is California. So you need to deal with the fact that it’s largely an urban/rural divide, not a state/state divide. But even then Maine and Vermont have extremely liberal rural areas that buck that trend too. And optimistically I sometimes think most Republicans are victims of propaganda and that they don’t deserve to be left behind as a result of being manipulated by the wealthy.
They have a point though. Musk did indeed take the US president’s job for a while and was simultaneously living off welfare (gov subsidies for his private businesses). Oh and according to his brother, he’s an illigal immigrant too.
He’s the only example I can think of.
That’s due to Immigrant Jorge. He works ten million jobs and is a statistical outlier, he should not have been counted.
I mean fuck them and everything truly, but is this really such a paradox? It’s not like both can’t be true: say the men get jobs and the women and children get welfare. Or some immigrants take jobs and some are lazy and don’t. You can even get welfare while working if you are poor enough.
I’m just saying - trying to fight this mindset by calling it an impossible paradox will not work because that doesn’t even make basic sense. I know you’re only parroting what’s been said in a million tweets, so I’m not blaming you for inventing this idea. Just maybe stop repeating it like it’s a super clever gotcha. It isn’t.
If immigrant families are getting benefits when adults in the household are working jobs, this means they are below the federal poverty line that makes them eligible. (Usually if a child was born in the US to immigrant parents, the family will qualify for some benefits because the child is an American citizen.) This means that immigrants are working jobs where they are being underpaid, because no American in their right mind would want to work a job that pays wages below what it takes to stay alive. The narrative that these people are getting free benefits, and Americans aren’t is a bullshit narrative. Immigrants aren’t stealing jobs; their labor is being exploited in positions Americans don’t want.
You can’t think of a single thing an immigrant has made worse?
Then you must not heard of Elon Musk.
Surpressed wages. Immigration is just a consequence of the bourgeoisie war against the proletariat. It works double for them because they can blame the immigrants that they bring in for people’s problems and can use them to make those problems worse.
You aren’t going to find pro immigrant leftists. You will find humanitarian leftists that think the people the right bring here should be treated like people.
even by that logic, it is not the immigrant who is suppressing wages, but the capitalist. and he is so giddy about cunts blaming the immigrant with suppressed wages.
That’s what I said.
It’s a little more complex than this. Wage suppression does occur but only at the very bottom strata of employment, specifically those producing use-values that are directly consumed within the country where the labour is performed. Employment in industries producing globalised/exported commodities tend not to see wage suppression and often sees an opposite effect as the higher concentration of highly-qualified labour attracts more investment. All this is to say that the overall effect doesn’t tell the whole story, and different sections of the bourgeois may have differing reasons for supporting/opposing immigration.
dude, HB-1 visas lower wages in the tech sector, and there is a reason big tech corpos are so desperate to increase how many there are, so they can bring immigrant programmers to the USA and pay them 50K a year instead of a 150K a year a American programmer might get. They can also exploit them to work 80hour weeks or more because the visa is dependent on the companies sponsorship.
It’s also a reason the AMA doesn’t let foreign doctors practice in America w/o a crazy certification process that takes years to go through. They know it would lower physicians wages if doctors for eastern Europe could immigrate here and would glad to work for 80K.
Nobody likes to talk about these things because they are politically incorrect. Bring them up and people will tell you you’re being an asshole.
Immigration is a complex problem at all bands of the economic spectrum. On the rich end, countries have national programs to actively court rich people to become citizens and expedite the process… because they want their money and assets in country. And on the flip side, nobody wants poor people because they are economic burdens who often use a lot of public resources.
Correct, but this more a case of qualifications chasing investment rather than vice-versa. It’s not the kind of immigration that tends to get ‘debated’ in terms of how much of it should be allowed, though the H1Bs were kind of in the news cycle a few months ago.
I live in a big tech city and it’s a very hot topic here on both sides. A lot of HB-1 visa holders are basically ghettoized in their companies and socially from the ‘tech bro’ workers who are from upper middle class white/asian families. They do a lot of the same work, but their wage differential is like a factor of 2-4x for the same job.
But true that it’s not a big deal nationally, which seems to mostly focus on latin american emigration of uneducated low wage laborers.
That’s fair. I didn’t realise how socially divisive the H1Bs were, though it makes sense now that you mention it.
one of my friends rents out his spare bedroom to hb-1 holders and people flip out at him for it. he’s just a nice guy looking to give someone a leg up in this shitty world. and the people who shit on him the most are the ones who got houses paid for by their parents.
That’s not an immigration issue, it’s worker exploitation. We allow companies to hire unprotected workers and exploit their situation without consequences.
And yes, same is true of h1-b. As written, it theoretically would not reduce wages, but in reality it does because employers exploit their situation without system and the “trapped worker.
In both cases, wjilynarenwenletting corps get away with this?
All my favorite food and culture comes from regions I am not native.
It puts downward pressure on wages. That pressure is way overblown by Republicans and there are plenty of solutions to address it that don’t involve sending icestapo in to break up families though.
Pretending that this pressure doesn’t exist just makes people like us who want to stop this seem out of touch to the normal person who has concerns about immigration, which the election showed is a very large chunk of Americans and westerners in general.
These concerns should be addressed by showing the relative magnitude of the problem compared to benefits gained from immigration along with solutions for stagnating wages, not outright dismissal.
It puts downward pressure on wages
This is not the fault of immigrants. It’s the fault of billionaires exploiting one of the most vulnerable people in the country for profit. It only exists because of capitalist greed.
It’s the fault of billionaires
Agreed. Glad I can count on you not to vote Democrat or Republican ever again.
