Depends on cultural differences and their qualification.
For example basically noone complains about Ukrainian/Belarusian programmers working in Poland.
There is quite significant presence of Ukrainians in Poland and it is widely accepted and so far no major problems happened.
> On 14 September 2018, 33,624 Ukrainian citizens possessed a permanent residence permit, and 132,099 had a temporary residence permit.[4] About 1 to 2 million Ukrainian citizens are working in Poland.[5][6] There are also 40,000 Ukrainian students in Poland.[6]
How are you defining "economic refugee"? Lots of countries benefit from people coming to that country to work. In many cases, those people end up as net contributors to the public purse; the individual is better off, the recipient country is better off.
There are a few countries who will pretty much let anybody in. Migrants often bring with them skills that the locals don't have, and in any mass migration, those who migrate (vs stay where they are) tend to be the fitter, smarter, richer people.
The main reason not to take migrants is you might see substantial economic losses as migrants send income back home to support family. You might alienate your existing population with conflicting cultures. And with enough immigration, the migrants might eventually outnumber the original population and persecute them (eg. indian reservations).
It's all a tradeoff, but I suspect there always a few countries worldwide who will take anyone.
Canada has pretty high standards though. You need some combination of language proficiency, education, skills, youth, health, and wealth.
There are countries that will let "anybody" in. There are countries that take large numbers of immigrants. I seriously doubt there are countries that do both.
> in any mass migration, those who migrate (vs stay where they are) tend to be the fitter, smarter, richer people.
Completely not true. Look at the migrations to the EU, as well as to the US. The “smarter, fitter, richer” people aren’t mass migrating from Latin America. Not at any significant percentage at least.
Obviously they might not be smarter, fitter and richer than people at the place they're arriving at, and that is one of the major reasons immigration is often restricted.
> The “smarter, fitter, richer” people aren’t mass migrating from Latin America
Not mass migrating but it isn't completely untrue either here in the EU, I keep meeting other Latin Americans like me who emigrated away and plan to never come back. It has only grown the past 5 years, of course I'm in a bubble of tech workers but most of the engineers I know who got a job in the EU from Latin America are some of the smartest and richer ones.
you might see substantial economic losses as migrants send income back home to support family.
Is that a real problem? Assume they get paid in local currency (e.g. US dollars).
Option one; they buy a foreign currency with those US dollars, and send that foreign currency overseas. The dollars stay in the US and get spent.
Option two, they send those US dollars overseas; those US dollars ultimately either come back to the US to be spent (in which case the fact that they circled around the world matters as much as if they sat in a wallet in Utah for a year), or they never come back and the US is ahead on the deal, given that the worker did some work but US society will never need to hand over goods/services in exchange.
I guess my hypothesis is that either those US dollars get spent in the US, or they don't. If they do, it's just like a non-migrant worker. If they don't, US society got work done and didn't have to give back goods/services - bargain for US society.
A currency exchange is a zero sum transaction. Whether it is US dollars or Philippine pesos makes no difference, the value stayed in-country.
When it gets sent overseas, it leaves the country and is spent elsewhere, so that is a loss in value for the originating country. The only value remaining would be whatever fee was charged on its way out.
If the US prints a million dollars, and some does a million dollars' worth of work in the US (or someone outside the US sends over a shipload of electronics in exchange for that big back of dollars) and moves that million dollars overseas, and those dollars never come back to be spent in the US, the US has gained. The US got a whole lot of work done, and did not have to give anyone goods or services in exchange.
The US has been doing this with a trade deficit for decades; giving people paper (or just numbers), which the US can make almost for free, in exchange for actual goods and services which people overseas happily send to the US. A trade deficit is free stuff. It's only a problem if the holder of all that paper comes back some day to spend it.
"When it gets sent overseas, it leaves the country and is spent elsewhere, so that is a loss in value for the originating country."
What value? The US did not give anyone goods or services, no goods from the US were transported to another country. What value was lost to the US? In the future, someone might come back with those dollars and exchange them for goods and services which they move outside the US. That would be a loss of value for the US, watching real goods and services go overseas.
I disagree. A lot of the US dollars that are held outside the US seem to be held not with an intention of spending them in the US, but out of trust that everyone will always agree they're valuable.
> If they do, it's just like a non-migrant worker.
It isn't quite. Imagine dollars leave the US, get sent to Nigeria, and eventually return to the US to buy some music.
Compare that to the case where the dollars do not get sent to Nigeria, but remain in the US.
In the latter case, the Nigerian person wanting their music needs to find another source for the dollars to buy their music. That in turn makes the dollar more valuable, and reduces Nigerias buying power for US products and services.
Imagine dollars leave the US, get sent to Nigeria, and eventually return to the US to buy some music.
I'm definitely on board with the idea that if those dollars never return to the US, then the US effectively got free labour (which is why a trade deficit, I often suggest, isn't automatically a bad thing - it's free stuff, at least until the dollars all come back!), which is quite a win for the US, and given that of all dollars sent overseas, some will never come back, the US has a steady supply of free labour purely because migrant workers are sending dollars overseas (which sure feels like a win for the US).
So the only "downside" for the US is if those dollars sent overseas do eventually make their way back and buy something; at that point the US is handing over goods and services in exchange for that original work done by the migrant worker. Not so much a downside as a delayed fair exchange.
Let me just think out loud for a moment; sending the US dollars to our Nigerian chum, and him returning them to the US in exchange for something, is the same (barring people skiming off the top and postage etc.) as our migrant worker just buying something and posting that to the Nigerian chum. So I think I agree with what you say, but I hypothesise it's not making the US any worse off than the money not making that round trip and just being spent on goods/services in the US by the migrant worker (barring postage etc).
NOT sending the US dollars to our Nigerian chum, and him needing to source US dollars from somewhere else, does make the US dollar a tiny bit more valuable as there is a tiny increased demand for it. Whether that's a good or bad thing for the US, I couldn't say, but if the US dollar becomes too expensive, US exports go down. At this point I guess we're heading into second-order effects of what happens when US exports become too expensive, and I wouldn't like to run into that right now.
It is one. The majority of migrants, qualified or not, have a hard time getting work permits. Finding work, low paid but paid, isn't the main challenge. Doesn't do any good if you aren't allowed to take that work so.
Also, our social systems are doing well. Thanks for worrying.
If you include pension systems, not so much. "Altersarmut" ("poverty of the old age") was not a widely used word in the 1990s, now it is a frequent topic in German media.
In many other European countries, old people live in their own properties with mortgages long paid off, so they aren't directly touched by rent increases. But Germans, for some reason, mostly like to live in rented flats and have a comparatively low home ownership rate, even in their old age. And the rents have grown quite a lot in big German cities. This means quite a squeeze for the elderly.
True. And we have Hartz IV, a national shame in my opinion. My point to OP was that, besides these facts, our social system is nowhere near to collapsing. No matter how many refugees we take in. That we as a nation, and that includes myself through our representative democracy, are ok with poor and old people being squeezed out of living space by rent seeking investors and treating people under Hartz IV as second class citizens is a different story. But we have elections in September, so there is a chance to shake things up a little bit.
Uh, anyone can make an asylum claim. An asylum claim is basically a plea to not be deported. It is usually a last ditch tactic when you are caught on US soil illegally, and you are not disputing that you are here illegally but are making a plea that you should not be returned anyway. It was a law introduced to aid Cuban boat refugees who were unable to apply for refugee visas and so always came here illegally.
The question is what are the grounds that would make such a plea legally successful, and being an economic refugee is not one of them. So while you are correct that economic refugees can make the claim, you are incorrect in that such a claim would succeed. People with red hair can also make the claim. Anyone can make the claim.
Depends on cultural differences and their qualification.
For example basically noone complains about Ukrainian/Belarusian programmers working in Poland.
There is quite significant presence of Ukrainians in Poland and it is widely accepted and so far no major problems happened.
> On 14 September 2018, 33,624 Ukrainian citizens possessed a permanent residence permit, and 132,099 had a temporary residence permit.[4] About 1 to 2 million Ukrainian citizens are working in Poland.[5][6] There are also 40,000 Ukrainian students in Poland.[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainians_in_Poland