Aside from racism. I mean economically/socially, what issues does too much immigration cause?
Immigration only really causes economic issues with bullshit employee specific visas like H1Bs - those visas trap immigrants in powerless positions where they’re unable to advocate for fair compensation and drive down overall wages.
Everything else is fucking bullshit xenophobia.
Would more supply of workers (even naturalized ones) not drive down wages too?
An increase in supply would reduce wages, unless it also increases demand. If you think about wages in cities vs rural areas, you’ll see that most of the time more people = more economic activity = higher wages.
Where this breaks down, is if there’s barriers of entry that prevent immigrants from participating in the economy fully. If immigrants aren’t allowed to legally work or start business (as happens with some asylum seekers or ‘illegal’ immigrants) then they are forced to compete over a small pool of off-book / cash-in-hand jobs, which could see a reduction in wages without a significant increase in overall economic activity.
Sounds like an argument for amnesty for illegals honestly. And more relaxed legal immigration pathways.
Eh, it doesn’t really seem like that tends to happen… economies are weird and if you keep adding people you tend to just get more and more service jobs.
Doesn’t sound that weird. More people means more people to serve, so more service jobs are needed.
and now you need houses for people to live in and people to make the houses, and now there’s more people and they invent things, which makes things better and more people come and there’s more farming and more people to make more things for more people and now there’s business, money, writing, laws, power,
Can we go on land yet?
But where does the extra money and infrastructure come from to provide everything they need?
More people means more mouths to feed, more strain on the limited housing market driving prices and inaccessibility up, more capacity required at hospitals, doctor’s surgeries, schools, all public services (meaning everything from more doctors, nurses, consumables, locations, etc needed), and so on.
Where does the money come from to provide for the net influx of 500,000+~ people a year, a population increase of some 0.75%?
I’m not against immigration, welcoming people from other cultures with fresh ideas and outlooks on life is great and I love it, but the strain it places immediately on our already failing societal systems, such as healthcare, education, housing availability, job availability, etc, is very real, and needs to be addressed.
more capacity required at hospitals, doctor’s surgeries, schools, all public services (meaning everything from more doctors, nurses, consumables, locations, etc needed)
So, skilled, high paying jobs? More architects, more plumbers, more software developers, more of all kinds of jobs
But where does the extra money and infrastructure come from to provide everything they need?
What is money in the first place? It represents labour and resources. So when a new person shows up, they themselves provide the money in the form of their labour. They are the money.
That money comes from taxes that rise with increased economic activity that rise with the population.
It depends on the kind of immigrant. You have students, high educated workforce, people that flee from war/not safe to stay country and people that just want a (economic) better life.
I think too much of any immigration can cause maybe an issue that the majority of people are new and that the culture (how do we interact with each other, what is acceptable behavior etc) has not settled.
From an economic perspective, it’s mostly positive. Raising a child is expensive, and those costs go on for about 20 years before you have a person that’s economically productive. Most Immigrants are adults and can join the workforce immediately. The economic costs of their childhood was paid by the country they came from. It’s a negative for the country they came from, this is refereed to as a “brain drain.” But for their new country, it’s like a tax paying worker just appeared out of nowhere.
As for the economic negatives, the big one is housing. Too much immigration all at once can result in a shortage of housing. It can also put stress on public services and infrastructure. Businesses may not have the capacity to serve a larger population. These things can adapt of course, but you can’t instantly build a house and you can’t instantly expand public services, etc. So you might want to limit immigration so an area can adapt to all of the various economic needs of a larger population. An immigrant will work and pay taxes and contribute to the local economy, so long term it’s all positives, but there can be a lot of short term problems if a population grows to rapidly.
As for social… well I’m not really much of a sociologist, but just from I can see, people who already live in an area might be uncomfortable being around people of a different culture. Might say crazy things like “They’re eating the dogs!” Yeah that’s crazy, but it is a problem. Not caused by the immigrants themselves, but it’s a problem that does happen when there’s immigration.
But there’s social benefits. Can learn from a new culture. May get some new options for restaurants to go to.
Generally the young will enjoy more social benefit (going out to the different restaurants and learning about different cultures), but the older people will tend to be uncomfortable with it. But that’s just the tendency.
So overall I’d say you do need limits on immigration to mitigate the short term issues, but it’s all positives in the long term.
It can suppress wages.
Immigrants often are expected to work for less money. After all, they usually immigrate from an economically worse country, so they don’t expect to land top tier wages.
You keep filling in minimum wage jobs with an endless supply of immigrants, then there is never a worker shortage and never any incentive to raise the bar. No company needs to compete with higher wages to attract talent. In fact, it can make things worse and cause a race to the bottom… Reducing wages on existing positions until workers quit and just filling it with less skilled workers.
If the company makes products the workers can’t buy, then who buys the products?
wealthier people in other countries buy the products, is what happens now.
This is dubious. Immigration can have massive positive benefits to the target economy.
Yeah, it pumps GDP numbers up. By having more people to do work.
Not by increasing GDP per capita.
Mostly to avoid having infrastructure and social safety networks overwhelmed. Yes, you will also see wages be depressed by large-scale immigration, but that’s something that could–in theory–be controlled by strengthening unions and labor regulations. That’s not where we are though; right now, unions and labor regulations are fairly weak, and are being gutted by courts even as the NLRB tries to strengthen them.
Housing takes time to build, and good city planning is necessary to ensure that cities are sustainable rather than being sprawls. (Not many cities do that, BTW; it’s usually, “oh, we’ll just add another lane to the existing 20 lane interstate”). Given that we’re currently in a situation where there’s insufficient low- and middle-income high density housing, and few companies are willing to build any more, competition for most of the immigrants that we’re seeing–people that are trying to get away from deep economic woes–would be fierce for housing.
and few companies are willing to build any more
I don’t think this is actually true. At least in my area, developers would LOVE to build condos and apartments all over the place, but local laws are holding them back.
I suppose even in a perfectly willing area that upgrades its infrastructure to support more people, you don’t want to move people in too quickly, before that infrastructure is available. But it’s easy to see that become a self fulfilling prophecy: we don’t take immigrants because we don’t have the infrastructure, and we don’t build the infrastructure because there’s no demand for it.
I don’t think anyone wants to make a brand new condo and try to full it full of fresh immigrants that other businesses are exploiting to pay less.
They want to develop 1 set of condos they can sell for $300k+ rather than 3 sets for $100k
Yeah this is the biggest issue.
The way most housing gets built where I live it works like this: A company handles the project management, buying the land, getting the permits, hiring the builders, doing the marketing/sales etc. This costs a HUGE amount of money, which they don’t have. So these projects get designed on paper and then sold to investors. These put in a big amount of money, with the expectation of the project making money in the sales of the housing in the end. This means they can often double their entry in a couple of years, which is really good in terms of investments. As the investors want to make as much money as possible, the company designing the housing have incentives to not only make the houses as dense as possible, but also as expensive as possible. Their margins in percent are about the same no matter the house, so a more expensive house makes them more money. This leads to really big expensive homes crammed together in either high rises or plots. It’s really dumb as well since detached homes are worth more, they build homes with like 2 meter between them. The biggest issue is, only rich people can afford these homes. Even though more homes are built, the majority of people looking to buy a home can’t afford these. Homes also get sold to investors again, to rent out as the house itself appreciates in value. These expensive homes also have the effect of driving up property prices in the area, which leads to more expensive houses and higher taxes.
In the end, it’s only the rich that profit. They get the good investment projects, making them even more rich. They get to buy the expensive new homes to live in. They get to buy the homes to rent out and use as an investment vehicle.
Some places have made them build cheaper homes as well, if they want to get the permit. But it’s not enough. We need to be building practical affordable homes, but we don’t cause the people putting up the money to build stuff don’t want to.
If only we had some sort of public entity that could fund housing investments with little to no financial gain, but great gains to public support and well-being that was also in charge of controlling and permitting immigration rates so that the two could be balanced…
Yeah, immigrants would be better served by apartments
No. No, that’s not it at all.
Immigrants would be better served by unprofitable low income housing, not feeding their meager scraps to pay artificially inflated rent prices to an offshore real estate investment company.
Well duh. In fact, they’d be better served by FREE housing!
In the realm of realistic solutions, apartments.
Fun fact! My coworker pays more in rent for his apartment than I do on the mortgage of my house. Most often this is true.
I’m getting a once over by the bank, he’s getting done once over by the bank and again by his landlord, and they might not ever be different.
So how is an immigrant supposed to thrive when a foreign investment firm is profiting off them twice?
Subsidize affordable housing, tax wholesale & foreign landlords out of existence. It’s simple.
It’s a pipedream.
AFAIK, the issue around me is largely profitability. You can buy up acres if land, chop it up into 1/2ac parcels, quickly build cheap “luxury houses”, and sell them for 2-3x your costs, easily earning $200k+ per house sold (“Coming soon, from the low $400s…!”). And it’s all with fairly minimal regulation, compared to building high-density housing in existing cities. Compare and contrast that with building low- and middle-income high-density housing, where you’re going to end up managing it as apartments (probably not condos; that’s uncommon in my area); that means that you’re in the red for a larger number of years before you pay back the initial costs of construction, since the profitability comes through rents.
Maybe I’m wrong; all I can comment on is the kind of building that I’m seeing in my area, and the way that the closest city–which was originally about 90 minutes away–is now alarmingly close.
Sprawl sucks. Density is what we should be promoting.
Of course, and I agree (…even as I’m looking at buying a few hundred acres of land in a desert three hours away from any town over 1000 people…). But you’ve got a lot of incentives working against that.
The town I’m in is starting to be a suburb of the city 90 minutes away; the town wants these people, and their homes from the low $400s, because that’s more tax base; they pay property taxes that the town wouldn’t otherwise have. So my town is happy–kind of–to be part of the problem.
In Canada it’s causing a huge housing crisis. Lots of newcomers do not have the finances for what rent is here either so end up in limbo.
Yes but that’s a side effect of this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-family_zoning
Which is also screwing over regular people and also causes you to have shittier cities with suburban sprawl, oh and those zoning laws are also racist in origin
It isn’t just housing it’s infrastructure in general. Governments are happy to bring in more bodies to fill jobs and pay taxes but don’t bother to plan accordingly and infrastructure takes a long time to build leading to a lagging effect.
Hospitals, transit, housing, etc. It’s all being overwhelmed right now.
Sounds like too many landlords, not too many immigrants.
Porque no los dos?
I’m not from Canada, but because I have the natural human instinct to help people
The irony of a nation of colonial land thieves complaining about immigration …
Canadians should settle their debts with First Nations and honour their treaties, like good immigrants before judging others.
They sure should.
To add to your point…every nation stole or was stolen from someone else at some point. I always laugh at this argument. No one’s giving anything back that they were born into and didn’t literally take themselves. Are we going to find Henry the Viiis ancestors and make them answer for his barbaric ways? No. Egyptian pharaohs who enslaved countless people and god knows what else? No.
You can only laugh from a place of privilege. Please educated yourself on the Indian Act and progress with existing treaties. Your comment is at odds with the reality in Canada.
My comment just speaks the hard truth. You talking to me on the Internet is on the blood sweat and tears of someone else. Nothing is nice about anything when you go into the history of it all.
Oh dear. I’ve just seen your comment history. I don’t think we’ll be agreeing on much. Good luck.
Oh dear. I’ve just seen your comment history and I don’t care.
Immigrants are often effectively scabs. They work for less, take more abuse, that sort of thing. And It’s a lot harder to form a union when half the workers don’t even speak the same language.
They definitely need strong worker protections and a force to represent them.
There only are so many resources for them. Here in many European countries the main issue (I think) is that with the current numbers we fail to teach them all our language (it’s simply not possible without having more language teachers available, and apart from needing those teachers that also needs more money). Without knowing the language their professional development is massively hindered, causing many to remain lower class, and causing disproportionately high crime rates among certain groups.
This leads to further problems: In the big cities there already are schools where people who speak the local language are a minority (for example in a primary school near me they have two classes for each grade (1-4) for children who can’t speak German yet and one class for all grades together for German speaking children).
So guess what people do: They go to a district with less immigrants, while the districts with many immigrants keep getting more immigrants (since cost of living is low there and as pointed out earlier many struggle to leave lower class). We’re re-creating segregation. This makes it even harder for those people to leave lower class, since they have no networking opportunities but only know others from lower class instead.
Even the left wing parties are now saying that we have to reduce immigration and instead integrate immigrants better.
Ethnic enclaves - tons of these in Canada.
It happens in any country that has immigrants.
That’s a good point. Maybe a more even distribution of immigrants would help.
It’s a little strange to me because the US has no official language. My poor grasp of Spanish and Chinese is actually a hinderance here in California.
That’s a problem though, you can’t dictate where people live, within the country. Even if you tried, assigning them to a very expensive town, perhaps where no one knows them or speaks their language just puts them dead in the water.
Also, the US has a primary language, not a federally official language. The same issues of disadvantage occur if you can’t speak English.
So the reason to limit immigration is because you fail to teach them the language? How is that a reason, and not just one form of limitation?
Instead, why not ask: why not invest more into supporting integration programs? Because immigration tends to have hugely positive impacts on the target society. The only reason not to invest in it would be… 🤔 some kind of fear…
The reason is that there’s not an infinite amount of ressources. Integrating them properly works well as long as there are enough ressources, but when too many come in a too short timeframe it sadly does not work for all of them (also makes it much harder for them to get proficient at German since they can live in their own bubble and just talk in their native language).
(And we have many ressources, but we (Austria) took the most immigrants per capita of all central European countries, even significantly more than Germany which is known for having taken so many. We really are trying.)
It’s easier for most people to believe that different coloured or dressed folk, or those that look the same but speak differently, are the reason your life is difficult. It couldn’t possibly be the people that look and sound like you that are your problem. In the UK it’s been said before that a white British guy in a factory job has more in common with a Jamaican bricklayer or a Polish chamber maid than they do with Boris Johnson. I believe that position.
Aside from racism, it is usually the belief that the new immigrants will either be economic competition for those with jobs or a drain on welfare.
That combined with a lack of available housing are the answers I see most often.
in my country that’s exactly what is happening, they are taking the simpler jobs for much cheaper, and lot of our “native” people has/had jobs like this.
ironically, this country is among the loudest in anti-immigration in the EU, all the while they are immigrating people from neighboring countries exactly for cheap labor.
The “shot in the foot” effect when you accept immigrants from conservative/racist countries and they and - most likely - the next generation will vote right wing which more accurately mirrors those conservative/racist beliefs.
In my opinion, country-based immigration paired with needs-based works really well.
Ultimately, many of the best parts of the culture of a place are because of what people brought with them years ago. Some of the best restaurants are because someone in India moved to the UK, and then moved to the US and brought the culture of Curry Mile or Brick Lane with them, or because a community of Greek railroad workers decided to set up bakeries using their known recipes that all the locals love.
The same often goes for business. Look at the rise of Aldi and Lidl, and how cheap produce and great workers rights will suddenly make local supermarkets look in bewilderment at how markets they once dominated are being torn away from them.
IMO, if you have skills to offer, you should be welcome. I’m currently in the process of moving to the US on a high-skilled visa, and it is mad how one country will require thousands in legal fees and 24+ month waits while a country next door will say “Shit, you can teach?! Come join us! If you want to stay permanently that’s fine!”
It’s a complex and polarising issue. The main problem is that some, sometimes most, of immigrants don’t want to assimilate. They are creating ghettos, don’t respect local laws. Other issue is that governments prefer to spend tax payer money for accommodating immigrants instead of solving nation’s issues.
I wouldn’t limit immigration per se. I would limit unchecked illegal immigration and spend more money on assimilating immigrants that want to contribute to a country they moved into.
The main problem is that some, sometimes most, of immigrants don’t want to assimilate. They are creating ghettos, don’t respect local laws.
Generalisations like this are the very reason it’s a polarising issue. Opinions like yours generally derive from “observation” and “gut feeling”. Which by definition is completely anecdotal and harmful when it begins to be applied to millions of people all at once.
Betsy from insert town here sees an immigrant couple down the street in her home-town keeping to themselves and not really wanting to take part in the community. She’s talking on the phone to nosy-nessie the town busybody who says “oh…you know…my aunt said the same thing about her insert culture neighbours.” And then all of a sudden, that’s just “how those people are”…all of them…everywhere.
Maybe this couple is just a little embarrassed about their english skills and want to strengthen them more before going into public everywhere, which comes across as shy. Maybe they’re just private…who knows. But suddenly…“it’s just how (those people) are”, becomes the anecdotal “truth”.
It’s wrong, it’s dangerous, and the fact that you don’t even grasp the irony of your own comment is telling in a lot of ways.
No unfortunately. There is plenty of evidence of immigrants building their own justice systems and authorities under the radar of their new countries because it goes against the freedoms and expectations.
We shouldn’t ignore that and not talk about it.
Great. Then you shouldn’t have any problem coming up with three examples for us all.
Regarding potential societal issues:
When multiple cultures mix together, one of two things can happen:
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The cultures mesh well and either coexist or mutually mix into something new
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The cultures do not mesh well and this leads to all sorts of problems, especially increased crime
The second usually happens when both cultures place opposite value in something. For example, one culture places a high value on self and the other places a high value on being in a group, this can lead to a divide between cultures. Eventually, the resentment each group has for each other will lead to violence and other sorts of crime. One culture may think “I made the money for myself,” while the other thinks ,“we should all share the money.” If people don’t learn how to get along, you can probably see how that would increase criminal activity. In most cases, it is usually the expectation that the immigrant adapt to the culture of the new place they have moved to, rather than the new place’s home residents being expected to adapt to every immigrants different country cultures.
It also isn’t good when immigrants enter a new country and do not know the laws of the country they have entered. They may commit crimes that could have been legal wherever they came from, but now someone may be a victim to a crime and the immigrant did not know. Now, usually immigrants that legally enter a country do learn about the basic laws of the country and the basic culture, but ones that enter a country illegally may know nothing about the place they are in. They may continue to act the same as they did in their previous home, which may have very different laws, leading to further divide.
It’s a racist lie that increased immigration leads to increased crime.
The mythical tie between immigration and crime - a Stanford Study
In most cases, it is usually the expectation that the immigrant adapt to the culture of the new place they have moved to, rather than the new place’s home residents being expected to adapt to every immigrants different country cultures.
Yeah this topic is really showing my American bias. Or rather Californian. I’m used to a fluid, adaptable culture.
I would be really hesitant to trust the answers here. How many people responding on Lemmy actually have an educated position on how these systems work? Because I can tell you that there are some fields where Lemmy users are just plain ignorant, while displaying all the confidence of certainty. Especially when you include Europeans on the topic of race… what a shitshow.
The safe reading of this thread is to assume every response is an ignorant, bitter xenophobe who gets all their info from a Fox news equivalent. You can still hear their point, but don’t be fooled into thinking they aren’t missing something that completely flips the story.
In general, I assume everyone on lemmy is some form of absolute moron, and I’m more often right than wrong.
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Historically, US actually was quite welcoming of immigration, including from Mexico. It tends to ebb and flow. I was taught by an economist that typically you open the flood gates when you want the labor, while restricting it when you don’t. To him, labor works just like goods in supply/demand curves. Flooding a market can drive down value of labor, etc., which can be bad for local workers. Obviously it’s a little more complex, but that’s the jist.
The trouble is, with globalization, one must wonder if that S/D curve is still valid. I imagine it is in some sectors, but in others, those jobs have been outsourced. If this is a bigger strain on demand, then it’s better to keep immigration on lock. That would at least help explain why it’s so hostile currently, but I’m just thinking out loud. I don’t necessarily agree with the economist approach.
Flooding a market can drive down value of labor, etc., which can be bad for local workers.
That makes sense, but in the long run/bigger picture, having a bigger employable workforce results in more consumers, which means a growing economy.
I’m not well versed enough in macroeconomics to explain how to promote the economy without lowering wages, but surely it can be done. “They’re taking our jobs” just sounds way too reductive.
It actually has more to do with training and education. In developed nations, people get more education and the result is a larger void in the low skill labor force who are employed by them. Ironically, more education results in lower wages for white collar work and higher wages for blue collar work, haha. Unfortunately we rarely talk about education, economics and immigration in the same breath, so it’s rarely addressed in politics.
Automation also adds a wrinkle, as low skill labor has been automated with technology. It’s credited as one of the major contributions to the wage gap, as efficiency is a boon to the owning class, not the working class. But I digress…
