[realusername]

I agree, people are always saying they want to abolish borders but in reality, there are hard consequences to that, you need to have some border for countries to improve. Otherwise everyone is just going to move somewhere else with a better quality of life and this is providing a race to the bottom with giant slums in those places whereas some countries would be almost empty because everyone would move.

[ikeboy]

Studies show that increased immigration is actually good for the economy. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/03/bernie-... has a bunch of sources for that.

Besides, if extremely large numbers of immigrants would be harmful, you can open up borders gradually.

[Nursie]

>> Studies show that increased immigration is actually good for the economy.

Yes, but I believe the jury is still out on whether it actually benefits the ordinary workers in that economy, or if just benefits business by providing a cheaper workforce.

[ikeboy]

One study I saw suggested that 90% of workers saw improvements.

Edit: see https://www.nber.org/papers/w12497.pdf

[Nursie]

Well, that's certainly interesting.

It does say there seemed to be a small negative effect on the least educated, who are presumably competing for jobs at the low end.

[ikeboy]

Yes, those without a high-school degree saw a small decrease. Although even that may be countered by lower prices, I've seen that argument somewhere.

[Nursie]

Quite likely, there will be a feedback mechanism allowing businesses to produce cheaper products if they have access to a larger (and therefore cheaper) labour pool.

[realusername]

I don't doubt that, it's just I don't believe in opening borders in one go, it would be too brutal and it would do more harm than good but indeed if we open the borders slowly little by little and improve the conditions in other countries in the mean time (to reduce inequality between countries) it could be much better. Otherwise you are going to have 15M Chinese and Indians moving into the same city in just a few months, it would be way too brutal. So maybe one day it will work but for now, there is way too much inequality for this to work.