[lord_ring_11]

I am ok with selective immigration. But open borders is truly crazy idea at this point. If we open borders like suggested next thing we know will be - developed countries becoming like garbage dumps we see in other countries. There is a reason why some countires fall into downward spirals. If u get its people en mass without filters, you get that mentality too.

Why dont we experiment in smaller scale with liberal companies like facebook/google/microsoft opening its employment where anyone from anywhere can come and say i want to be employed here and goog/fb/msft have to take them in? Lets even throw in a restriction that person should be cs degree holder from anywhere in the world. Lets see how it goes.

[forkLding]

Isnt that how the Facebook/Google/Msft works right now with visa sponsorship and their remote hiring/working policies?

My friend working for Google moved later to Paris, France because she could and is still working for Google in France, I think companies like Facebook (in Ireland and certain European countries) or Google (literally everywhere in Europe) or even IBM (IBM has quite a few major offices in Asia, not sure why) already practice open border policies as part of a much wider remote working policy and have people from different countries working in different countries (aka somebody Spanish working in US while someone from US working in Ireland for example).

[int_19h]

They're limited by the H1-B quota.

And remote work usually pays local rates (proportionally better than average, but still), not what you'd get in US.

[hueving]

You can have open borders or a good social safety net. Pick one.

[tom_mellior]

Explain please? Immigrants pay into safety nets just like anyone else who pays into them.

[krferriter]

If 10 million poor people with no employable skillsets move into Europe, they would be withdrawing vastly more from the tax pool than they would be putting into it. People who do not contribute to production would just move wherever the local government will give residents the most resources.

[tom_mellior]

> If

If, yes. All this is conditioned on your racism that tells you that all foreigners are uneducated (and uneducatable)/lazy/freeloaders.

In addition, all of the tax money paid out would immediately be spent by these alleged freeloaders on meeting their needs for food etc., so it would flow back to producers of useful stuff and a lot of it come back as taxes.

[hueving]

That's not a racist 'If'. There's a massive backlog of unskilled rejected immigrants from poor countries that would be way better off living on the US social system than the one in the country they originate from.

Immigrants aren't magic, the ones that want to leave the most to come to the US are the ones from countries with bad education systems and bad social safety nets. Why would someone leave a good social safety net for a worse one?

>In addition, all of the tax money paid out would immediately be spent by these alleged freeloaders on meeting their needs for food etc., so it would flow back to producers of useful stuff and a lot of it come back as taxes

Except for all of the loss incurred by the things they consume. The only thing that comes back in taxes is a fraction of the profit on whatever they consumed.

Unless someone is producing more economic value than they consume, they are a net loss on the whole economy. There is a limit to how many people like this an economy can support before it will collapse.

It's just another insurance market like any other. The premiums coming in (tax rev) have to be more than the payouts (safety nets).

[hueving]

Anyone making minimum wage isn't actually paying into safety nets. The massive backlog that would be allowed in with open borders are unskilled laborers that would be making minimum wage (or less illegally).

[tom_mellior]

> Anyone making minimum wage isn't actually paying into safety nets.

Anyone making minimum wage isn't necessarily using the safety nets either (depending on those nets, and how much minimum wage is), so /shrug/.

More to the point, as the original article also points out, we have had this exact natural experiment in the EU with the recent eastward expansions. Almost all poor people in poor countries stayed where they were. The ones that did emigrate to work... do work.

According to EU law, while there is freedom of movement for work (or whatever other purpose, as long as you are self-sufficient), there is no freedom of movement that allows you to go to another EU country and live off benefits. The "flooded by immigrants who live off of benefits without ever having payed into the system" scenario is exluded by law, and this works in practice.

Other countries could easily copy this system while opening their borders.

[int_19h]

You can have both, if social safety net does not automatically apply to every resident.

[lord_ring_11]

“If enough of them came, they might vote for an Islamist government...”

Given the rate of expansion of islam, i would say when not if.