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by big-green-man
683 days ago
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I understand what you're saying, I was particularly moved by the story of the Vietnamese woman who lost her son crossing a river. It's heartbreaking. For some of these people it's better odds. Particularly I'm sympathetic to people living in places like Venezuela or central Africa. But for the rest, people from places like Vietnam or China or Chile, their situations are most certainly not worth the risk. They were either sold propaganda that it was easy, or they are risking their family's lives irresponsibly for the prospect of financial gain on the idea that they can become sensationally rich in the US. I've personally known people from both of those sets, and I've been to some places in the world (and not as a military person or something like that) and seen things about as horrendous as are outlined in this article. Losing your job during covid is not a solid motivator for a rational person to decide to do this. It takes intense desperation, delusion about the danger, or the idea that it will be incredibly worth the risk. Only people in the first circumstance can justify doing something like this when it's all said and done. The rest, they'll be traumatized in the best case scenario and then wind up in the same situation they were in back home, living in crime riddled ghettos paying too much in rent and working dead end shit jobs to barely scrape by. For many that's a worse existence than they left. There's a siren on the shores of the US, and it's song is "the land of opportunity." I've had people tell me that they literally believed the streets here were paved in gold until they arrived. The truth is, in most of the countries where these people come from, day to day life is pretty comparable, and your chances of hitting it big are about the same. The only real benefit to those but the truly desperate is arbitraging the labor markets between countries using remittances. You can send money home to your family and they can move up and then when they're set you can return and have a higher class life. I don't believe it's moral to risk the lives of your small children for something like that. |
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The problem, as I see it, has nothing to do with whether people should make this journey or how much immigration is "enough" immigration. The underlying problem is the imbalance between entitlement programs and immigration. Entitlement programs create an incentive to be inside the country's borders that doesn't otherwise exist.
Both politicians and most media outlets have done a great job focusing discussion and debate on symptoms rather than root cause, that may have been intentional or unintentional. We can run in circles debating who and how many we want to allow to immigrate legally. That debate will never end when its based entirely on personal opinion.
A country with any entitlement programs has to control their borders at limit immigration. An interesting question is what to do when borders and immigration can't be controlled effectively. In that scenario, can the country continue to have entitlement programs without government debt spiralling out of control?