Originally posted by Eternal Idol
No, you're just not hearing what you want to hear, and you don't know what you're ****ing talking about.Roy Beck argues that immigration hurts the immigrant's home country's economy, while doing next to nothing for people as humanitarian cause because there are still billions of poorer people in the world...
I don't know of anyone who claimed immigration to wealthier developed countries was the solution to world poverty. Humanitarianism takes a utilitarian approach of helping as many people as possible--the numbers that count--and was never an all-or-nothing endeavor. The only thing he suggested that I found agreeable was the need to develop impoverished countries, but he shared no ideas of his own on how to do so. Infrastructure, technology, agriculture, and potable water programs seem like a good start.
Whatever losses in raw GDP a country might experience are often recouped, and then some, via remittances from immigrants who now make enough to support themselves AND their families back home.
Wikipedia - Remittance
As long as we're discussing poverty, I'd take it a bit further and suggest we need the following here at home:
*a drastic redistribution of wealth via tax reform that favors the poor working classes and the middle class
*a significantly-reduced military budget;
*an increase to infrastructure projects;
*free public universities;
*a single-payer healthcare system;
*and stricter legal accountability for elected officials and businessmen.
Eternal Idol 2020
Good post, but a few things.
Because he didn't name the common sense ideas "Infrastructure, technology, agriculture, and potable water programs seem like a good start" and he didn't say those key words that everybody like to say and hear, means he didn't offer solutions?
I think you can agree, just because he didn't say those words, doesn't mean he doesn't believe in them, I think you could also agree that just because someone says them doesn't actually mean anything. Pro active words are empty without proactive action behind them.
Remittances don't solve the receiving countries problems if they only supply a small portion of basic necessities from those countries. Like you said about: "Infrastructure, technology, agriculture, and potable water programs seem like a good start", if those don't exist, remittances are not going to solve the problem for the receiving country.
Also, do we know if remittances are taxable, and how much, and how much it is enforced and how successful, because that is really the only way that remittances would help the receiving country besides the tax on good purchased with those remittances.
Lets just take a country like Mexico, who is in constant poverty, but they took in 26.1 billion in remittances last year, and its their top sources of income. Meanwhile we have a $463 billion trade deficit as of last year with Mexico.
So why does this matter in regards to everything we have been talking about.
Simply, we bring in people illegally, they cut in line in front of the legal immigrants, send their money home to make Mexico richer, even though they are a 3rd world country, and meanwhile they dont help their people much and we have stacked up a $463 billion trade deficit with them?
How does it help the people in the US with this situation to be replaced with people who send their money home and weaken the job market here at home for the people that are competing with those low skilled jobs?
Yes they can come here and instead of making $10-20 a day, they can make $80-100. But how does it help the US and the people here given everything described above?