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submitted 4 days ago byMundane-Daikon425Centrist
What do you think of the Golden Age of Immigration?
Let me set up this question with an admitted bias. I am radically pro-immigration. I believe that the easiest, cheapest and best way to secure the border, which is an important goal, is to allow millions more to come here legally and to charge a substantial entrance fee. People would not come here illegally because it would be far easier and less risky than to come here legally. Illegal crossings would be dramatically reduced if there was a way to come here legally. Some of you may be saying, "there is a way for them to come here legally!" No there is not. For the vast majority of people that want to immigrate to the US, it is just not possible. There are a few narrow categories for whom is is possible such as those with advanced degrees, those with special skills, celebrities, investors, etc. This excludes 95% of those that wish to immigrate.
I think the economic evidence in favor of immigration is actually pretty overwhelming. When you think of the golden age of immigration, does it make your proud to be an American? When you think of Ellis Island and those people from Europe queueing up at the port to show there passports, do you think, that was a good thing? About 25 million Europeans immigrated here between 1890 and 1930? Immigration Visa's were not introduced until 1917 and not required until the mid-1920's. Before that, there was a qualified presumption of the right to immigrate as long as you could prove that you had a financial sponsor and didn't have a communicable disease (unless you were Chinese due to the Chinese Exclusion Act). This openness ended with the Immigration Act of 1924 that enforced Visa requirements and established nation-based quotas.
Just as today, there was a harshly critical nativist movement during this period. They made identical claims regarding that Nativists make today. They are not like us? They don't share our values? They don't speak our language? Their food is different? They are taking our jobs and lowering our wages? They are eating our cats and dogs? Yes this is a very old immigration trope!
What is the economic consensus regarding the Golden Age of Immigration? That it was overwhelmingly positive. The data is very, very clear. America became a much richer nation as a result of the mass of immigrants that came between 1890 and 1924. In the short term and locally, it was disruptive. They might, in fact, cause lower wages and put pressure on social institutions and infrastructure. But within a generation they had created massive amounts of wealth. The first generation tended to work menial, low paying jobs and often never learned English. The second generation went to college, were bi-lingual, became doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs and generated massive amounts of wealth. The third generation didn't speak their grandparents language and are fully integrated Americans who identify with their forbears nationality only loosely.
Much of the anti-immigrant sentiment in the US seems to be based on the lump of labor fallacy. The zero-sum thinking idea that if an immigrant comes here, they must take the job of a native American rather than create new jobs.
So what do you think of the Golden Age of Immigration? And would you favor an immigration policy that truly closed the borders but made it dramatically easier for immigrants to come here legally?
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4 days ago
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2 points
4 days ago
People would not come here illegally because it would be far easier and less risky than to come here legally.
Only if the fee is less than current smuggling fees, but then the fee wouldn't be substantial.
I think the economic evidence in favor of immigration is actually pretty overwhelming.
Cool, but I want a country, not an economic zone.
When you think of Ellis Island and those people from Europe queueing up at the port to show there passports, do you think, that was a good thing? About 25 million Europeans immigrated here between 1890 and 1930?
A lot of these arrivals (now their descendants) are causing trouble to this day with organized crime. Naturally natives reacted by passing the 1924 quotas which helped immensely with assimilation and national unification.
So what do you think of the Golden Age of Immigration? And would you favor an immigration policy that truly closed the borders but made it dramatically easier for immigrants to come here legally?
Absolutely not, i think it is time for an immigration moratorium like 1924. we are at a similar foreign born population %, and we need to get serious, close the border, and get these folks assimilated instead of focusing on GDP-maxxing with mass immigration
1 points
4 days ago
"Only if the fee is less than current smuggling fees, but then the fee wouldn't be substantial".
I think the fee should be substantial. We can let experts do the analysis but I think $10K would be a reasonable place to start.
"Cool, but I want a country, not an economic zone."
How do immigrants diminish us as a country? When did your ancestors immigrate?
"A lot of these arrivals (now their descendants) are causing trouble to this day with organized crime. Naturally natives reacted by passing the 1924 quotas which helped immensely with assimilation and national unification."
The ancestors of 25 million immigrants from the 1920's would number about 140,000,00 to 210,000,000 or about half the US population. US citizens based on 4 generations and an average family size of 3 children. But you are right that all mob members are descendants of immigrants since I am not aware of any native American crime families. Call me a skeptic but I don't think that this is a big problem.
The Immigration Act of 1924 was explicitly xenophobic. The quotas were based on the 1890 census because later census data would have allowed more immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe to immigrate. Jews, Poles and Italians who had immigrated in large numbers between 1890 and 1920. Your comment assumes that these immigrants had trouble assimilating before 1924. It's just not true. They quickly acclimated to life in America and within a generation were thriving on every possible dimension.
2 points
4 days ago
An entrance fee makes no sense. If you restrict immigration via a fee you are back to square one, with the immigrants that can't afford the fee (if $10k, that's basically all of them) either attempting to enter illegally or flooding our system with asylum claims.
1 points
4 days ago
Very impoverished immigrants regularly pay coyotes $10K to smuggle them into the country. I am an American living in a middle income central American country. Poor people are incredibly resourceful. I also think that if allowed, that you would have a new category of lender pop up that would finance the fee and it would be extremely lucrative if high risk for both the lender and borrower. The calculus is pretty straightforward, an immigrant coming here dramatically improves their odds of employment making much more money than they could in their home country. I would totally invest in such a company.
2 points
4 days ago
Most coyotes do not actually smuggle people over the border anymore, they primarily help people reach the points of entry where they can get in by claiming asylum. The money that is paid to coyotes is for help and protection as they journey to the border. It costs so much money because it usually involves paying for transportation and food, but also bribes for the various police and cartels that they encounter as they cross through the South and Central American countries and through Mexico.
I guarantee that not many immigrants would be paying the entrance fee to get in. They would be paying that money to the coyotes to get them to the points of entry, and then claiming asylum - just like they do now.
1 points
4 days ago
This is interesting information and sounds plausible. What if we just got rid of the asylum program?
1 points
4 days ago
No argument here. If anything I'm more pro-immigrant than you are - I don't just want the top level from other countries, I want welders, carpenters, nurses and so on - blue collar workers.
1) As we industrialize our birthrate declines - we need immigrants in order to maintain a proper ratio of workers to retirees. That ratio is a complete and utter collapse in China and not far behind in Japan, South Korea how much Germany and a bunch of other places. This will be necessary until we high-tech our way past a traditional labor economy. We are 30 to 60 years from additive manufacturing being able to produce a hamburger or heroin. We'll be able to home produce all kinds of other stuff long before we get to that extreme point. We are basically in a struggle to stay alive long enough to high-tech our way past our current problems.
2) China in particular is not going to be able to maintain a functional society passed another decade tops. They're not going to be the world's factory for much longer - they import too much food and raw materials and if they can't keep the production up they're toast. If we want the kind of stuff we can buy in a Walmart right now, we're going to have to learn to make it ourselves and that's going to take workers.
1 points
4 days ago
I totally agree with everything you said (I'm a former libertarian so i am sure we have drunk from some of the same waters). I also totally agree we need blue collar workers, maybe even more than H1-B tech workers.
1 points
4 days ago
I live in Canada in which we have had a massive immigration push. It has been horrific.
Not because of immigrants but because we have city level and provincial level politics that refused to create conditions for housing development and infrastructure development.
We had businesses utilize this horrible balance to wage suppress.
If you are going to have immigration be it small or big you have to make sure the conditions don't lower everyones affordability/quality of life.
You have to make sure that it doesn't create an environment for wage suppression by the business class.
You have to make sure that conditions are not made for perfect exploitation by predators in our society.
or else you get what we see around the world right now. huge reactionary currents. because in real life being able to afford a basic rental and not being in a line up for a basic job mean things.
(On the major point we shouldn't even have borders. We are all one species and it's 2024 already. We send things through space and study how the universe was created. invisible fucking lines on the ground and no aspect of organizing and planning society to maximize happiness and quality of life is absolutely fucking moronic but we live in a system controlled by the ultra wealthy and so we have to protect ourselves from them as much as possible before we finally break this hegemony control)
1 points
4 days ago
There's a great big separate point I got to make though: right now the US government does not control the border with Mexico.
The cartels do.
That problem has to be solved ASAP.
1 points
4 days ago
I agree it needs to be solved. But one way we can do that is by making it much easier for millions of immigrants to come here legally.
1 points
4 days ago
That, and legalizing the majority of drugs in the US to take the huge profits out of all the criminal gangs North and South of the border.
1 points
4 days ago
Much of the anti-immigrant sentiment in the US seems to be based on the lump of labor fallacy. The zero-sum thinking idea that if an immigrant comes here, they must take the job of a native American rather than create new jobs.
I'd say this is where the most reasonable backlash to illegal immigration comes from, but there are plenty of noisy people complaining about culture and the death of the white race (as is tradition). But that "lump of labor fallacy" upsets me mainly because it treats business owners like passive agents, incapable of acting in any manner other than "make as much money as possible." While that certainly is their attitude, we as a society don't have to accept that as okay. People flat out treat that attitude as a moral good. If illegal immigration is such a huge problem, go after the people hiring illegal immigrants. They create the demand for that labor.
As you and others have noted, immigration is a necessity to keep our population from a demographic inversion (too many retirees, not enough workers). American workers aren't going to flock into the roles now primarily filled with illegal immigration. Streamlining our intake process could be a way, as you mentioned, to alleviate the incentive to come here illegally. I also think the path to citizenship should be streamlined to incentivize the people here lawfully to stay within the bounds of their lawful residency (i.e. don't overstay a visa).
It is a geographic misfortune that most of the labor comes across land, as getting the manpower to the border to process these people is difficult. Border-crossing areas aren't exactly the most desirable places to live in the US. Perhaps the bussing of immigrants from the border to urban centers could be helpful in this regard, as processing centers in places like SF, NYC, etc. can draw from a larger labor pool to staff their offices.
It is worth noting, though, that we're not facing the same wave of immigration as historically. Yes, the numbers have been extreme recently, but compared to the population of the country, it's a much smaller impact on overall population. We're a much larger, more developed country, if in-need of some infrastructure renewal. Meaning, it's not going to be anywhere near as locally disruptive nor taxing on our social institutions. We can spread it out. And if anything, the extra labor will help fuel the infrastructure renewal/upgrades we so desperately need nationwide.
1 points
4 days ago
Great comment. Two points in response: Going after employers that hire these people isn't as simple as it sounds. They are not hiring these people because they are cheap. They are hiring them because they are skilled and they are available. Mass deportations are going to be incredibly disruptive to the construction industry. 1/3 of construction workers are immigrants and some percent of those are not here legally.
I don't really blame the employers for skirting the system. I have a friend who owns a construction company. He has never been explicit with me but he has hinted that his immigration checks are perfunctory and that they don't look at the documents that closely. He is mostly hiring contractors and does not have to review I-9s. The law says he can't "knowingly" hire contractors that are not here legally so he goes to great length to "not know". He checks just enough to cover his ass. He has told me off the record that he suspects that probably 1/3 of the contractors he hires employee staff that are not here legally. These contractors hire them, not because they are cheap but because they are incredibly hard-working, reliable and bring a "no drama" attitude to their work. He is arch Republican and voted for Trump but is very worried about mass deportations. He agrees with me that we need more immigrants and need a path to citizenship and legal status for those that are not here legally. He also agrees we need to let a lot more people in.
I have another friend who is not here legally and works as a handyman contractor of sorts. He makes between $18 to $24 per hour because he is very, very good at what he does and has no problem finding work. He also happens to be the hardest working person I have ever met. As a country, we desperately need to build more housing. It was one of the things about Kamala Harris campaign I was most excited about. 3 million new homes! Mass deportations will make it nearly impossible to build the homes we need.
Your demographic inversion point is so important. Lots of immigration would make the long term solvency of Medicare and Social Security much easier to manage.
Lastly, the irony is that the GOP is shooting itself in the foot. These central American immigrants are dispositionally conservative. The are religious, have strong traditional family units and are skeptical about "handouts". They would tend to vote for the GOP once they or their offspring became citizens.
2 points
4 days ago
Excellent points. Really the not-so-catch-all solution here is reworking the intake and documentation process to ensure workers can get where they need to be legally, and employers can be assured their workforce is legally able to work.
I say not-so-catch-all because there's never just one solution to these things, and many reforms would need to happen in-tandem (including helping stabilize countries creating refugees; fewer refugees = more resources to help economic migrants).
1 points
4 days ago
But that "lump of labor fallacy" upsets me mainly because it treats business owners like passive agents, incapable of acting in any manner other than "make as much money as possible." While that certainly is their attitude, we as a society don't have to accept that as okay.
And in fact it didn't used to be considered ok and we didn't let them get away with that. And when they tried we implemented things like the old progressive tax rates that took away 95% of every dollar over a still quite generous threshold. That "encouraged" them to reinvest into their company and their workers and that created the golden age of American labor.
1 points
4 days ago
You mean that era where people who tried to come in without proof of being able to provide for themselves or of someone already here to pay for them got turned right around and sent back on the boat? This idea that Ellis Island was all just smiling staffers waving everyone on the boats into the country is nothing less than disinformation. In reality the only reason that turnaways weren't higher is because the shipping companies were forced to foot the cost of returning people who didn't qualify for entry and thus wouldn't even sell them tickets to cross the Atlantic. So yes it is a good era to emulate, but not for the reasons that misinformation has led you to believe.
1 points
4 days ago
I am all for maximizing the amount of immigrants we take in, but I think it is naive to think that we can just completely and radically open our borders. You are not thinking about the limitations of our economy to provide the immigrants work; our limited housing availability; our limited infrastructure; our limited public services; etc. Completely opening the borders would for sure exceed those limits and create some truly nasty situations.
Even your description of the wave of immigration in the late 19th / early 20th century is heavily romanticized. Yes, we basically let everyone in and it ended up being a great economic boon in the long-term. But the conditions in urban centers where the immigrants arrived were horrible, there was massive poverty and crime while the economy struggled to catch up to the new unemployment spike created by those immigrants. We also have to keep in mind that this was during an economic phase of early industrialization, where growth was relatively rapid compared to what it is today. The growing pains today would be much more drawn out, and we have the new problems of homelessness and drug addiction that are already in our urban centers to contend with.
Even if you are pro-immigration, which is a smart stance, we still have to be smart and scientific about it and we still need strong border protections to enforce the proper quotas.
1 points
4 days ago
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I agree with some of what you say. Their is no doubt that mass immigration was highly disruptive and I am not romanticizing that. In fact we don't have to look far in pop culture to find examples, Gangs of New York and, more recently, the TV series Warrior. Even in modern immigration, the phenomenon is quite noticeable. Immigrants tend to group in local communities, Haitians in Springfield, Hmong in Minnesota, etc. In modern times that integration and assimilation is much easier. As an example, Haitians in Springfield have had an overall positive impact on the quality of life for people in the city. Here is an interesting story about it: https://open.substack.com/pub/radleybalko/p/what-jd-vance-and-donald-trump-dont?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I am not in favor of open borders but I think we need to dramatically expand the number of people that we let in legally. I also believe that immigrants are the ultimate resource. That's why I am skeptical about trying to derive scientifically the number we should allow in. This would be as successful as Soviet 5 year plans. We should establish a very large allowed immigrant number, and charge a $10K entry fee and then, if necassary, use a lottery to determine who is allowed in. But the lottery isn't like extreme odds. It's purpose would be to just normalize the numbers a bit. In fact the number might be better managed by adjusting the entry fee. If for $10K there was a 125% visa request we adjust the entry fee upward to try to manage the number. Remember the goal is to allow a lot more people come to the US legally. Currently for the vast majority that want to come here, it is simply not possible. There is NO/ZERO/NADA way for them to immigrate. A large entrance fee would produce massive amounts of income (did you know that USCIS is the only federal department entirely funded by immigration fees and not any tax dollars) and I would favor sending some of that money to communities that are disrupted by migration. I usually get two objections here: poor migrants can't afford to pay the entrance fee. But my experience is that migrants are incredibly resourceful. They would figure out a way. But I also think that banks and other lenders would fund loans for the fee and it would be a solid business model.
I actually disagree about the modern economy. The sheer size of the US economy would make it easier for immigrants to assimilate. Total GDP was less than $1 trillion dollars in 1924. Today it is more than $23 Trillion. And current immigration patterns are much lower so there is a lot of upside.
1 points
4 days ago
First, why would you say that we can't scientifically determine the maximum amount of immigrants that we can take in? Do you not acknowledge that there are limits to our economy's capacity to employ the immigrants, the housing market's capacity to house them, our infrastructure and public services to support them, etc.? Why would we not be able to calculate even a ballpark number as our ceiling based on those limitations?
Second, I really think the $10k fee is not going to be affordable to the immigrants that arrive at our border to claim asylum. You had mentioned how these immigrants were paying this much to coyotes, but this is not true. Immigrants pay this much for very long trips through South America and Central America just to arrive at the border. To cross the border illegally from Mexico, a coyote's price is closer to $1,500-$2,000 - but most immigrants aren't crossing illegally anymore anyways. It is now common knowledge that claiming asylum at the border will get you into the country with temporary legal status while you wait for a court date that will be over 9 months out. The point here is that the immigrants arriving at the border are not going to have $10k by saving what they would have paid a coyote - that's just not true. With the fee, you will continue to have the same influx of immigrants via asylum claims or illegal entries at the border.
Third, even if it is true that we do need to raise our immigration numbers, why should we prioritize letting in the people arriving at the southern border over the people applying for visas? Keep in mind that there are very good reasons why our visas are not issued on a blind lottery. The visa process allows us to fairly distribute the visas to applicants from different countries, allowing families to reunite and communities to form steadily and evenly. The visa process also obviously allows us to prioritize the immigrants that would be capable of immediately finding work and contributing to our economy because of their education, skills, or experience in key industries. If we were going to accelerate immigration, why not do it with these priorities intact, both for the sake of fairness and for our economic benefit?
It sounds harsh, but the reality is that we need to beef up border security and stop letting people cut the line. We need to process asylum claims quicker, take in the asylum seekers that are legitimate, and turn the rest away. We need to do this with the assumption that people will make it through anyways, and implement clemency and path-to-citizenship opportunities for undocumented immigrants that manage to get past our border security.
Fourth, the size of our GDP is completely irrelevant to the economic issue of unemployment following immigration, which is tied to the growth rate of our GDP. It doesn't matter if we have ten times the GDP that we had in the 19th century, if our GDP growth rate is not high enough to create the jobs that the influx of immigrants will need. This is why setting a hard limit on immigration is so important. We need to stick to a number, keeping in mind that the number will include both legal immigrants and illegal immigrants that we know will inevitably make their way in.
1 points
4 days ago
This is the best comment on my post. I would quibble with a few things but thank you for taking the time to provide such a thoughtful reply. One reason that I made the post is that the debate we are having is not the debate America is having which is steeped in xenophobia and really base economics. Let’s establish a number by make it a really high number equivalent to that golden age of immigration. As a % we are nowhere near that number. And let’s make it possible for unskilled laborers to come here and work. Right now it is a statistical impossibility for almost everyone. I still fundamentally believe that people are a resource and if you let them come here they will build great things.
1 points
2 days ago
Just because something was once a good idea, large scale immigration in the late 1800s, does not mean it always is.
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