| > It's not illegal, nor should it be illegal, for a corporation to structure its affairs so that it minimizes the amount of taxes it's legally required to pay Poor people pay more taxes than rich people. If you think that's fine, then we disagree on basic human morality. > Poor brown people committing crimes near me [..] are more of a problem for me than the business records falsification stuff that Trump was convicted of So then it isn't the fact that they're doing something illegal that bothers you. > illegal immigrants enrolling their children in American schools generally makes those schools work less well for existing American citizens, because being an illegal immigrant is highly correlated with not speaking English well, not sharing American cultural values, and being less cognitively able and therefore requiring more resources to educate. Aaaaand now we know why they really bother you. These stupid Mexicans don't Speaka Da Engleesh! They're clogging up the schools with spanish-speakers! What are we supposed to do, learn a second language?? Have ESL classes?! (I grew up in South Florida, so this is especially funny to me. Why don't we deport all of Miami? They speak Spanish there!? Kick Them Out!!!!) > I don't think this proposed banking regulation harms me in any way That is a great world view. Screw everyone else as long as I'm fine. > Industries that currently hire a lot of illegal labor would either start hiring citizen or legal immigrant labor at higher wages, or invest in more automation Nope. There isn't automation to cover even 5% of the labor out there. Even if there were, it'd be so expensive and take so long to develop that it wouldn't begin to justify the price. That's why we have the labor. And you can't automate skilled labor like cooking meals in a restaurant or building a house - unless you want to convince Americans to buy only prepackaged sandwiches and metal flat-pack homes? Good luck with that? If our produce/products are expensive, other nations have cheaper labor, so people buy their products rather than ours, so we can't sustain the same business. Which conservatives then respond to with protectionism, which then fails because our products remain too expensive and uncompetitive. Restaurants close because they can't make a profit and nobody wants to pay $50 for a burger. Construction slows and houses don't get built, causing even the middle and upper class to bristle as they can't buy overpriced homes because nobody can build them because there's no labor force (and even if there were, the homes would be so expensive even fewer people could buy them). We know all this because it's been tried before in different states/cities and nothing changes, because the economics isn't that complicated. > But people, immigrants or citizens, aren't just abstract units of labor; they are human beings who reside in a place, interact with other people living near them, speak a language, have children, etc. and all of these things are relevant to deciding how much the presence of a given immigrant helps or harms existing citizens I'm trying not to go there, but it really seems like you're saying "keep those spanish speaking brown people out of my nice white gated community". There's a word for that. |
This isn't generally true. Even the categories of "rich" and "poor" people are ill-defined, in part because people adjust their government-legible assets based on how they will be taxed on them. The relationship between someone's actual wealth and how much they pay in taxes is complicated, and falls out of the complex relationship between governments using tax policy to incentivize different behavior and people modifying their behavior based on those incentives. But no matter what, a person with a low income and a low amount of assets is only capable of paying so many dollars in taxes, and that number is lower than the amount that people much richer than them pay.
> Aaaaand now we know why they really bother you. These stupid Mexicans don't Speaka Da Engleesh! They're clogging up the schools with spanish-speakers! What are we supposed to do, learn a second language?? Have ESL classes?!
El problema no es solo Mexicanos que solo hablan español y no inglés - en los estados unidos hay extranjeros que vienen de muchos países del mundo, y que hablan muchos idiomas distintos. Los chinos, los afganos, los indios, los nigerianos, et cetera. Cuando las escuelas necesitan providir servicios educacionales a niños de muchos paises en muchos idiomas, la calidad de la educación que ofrecen sufre.
>> I don't think this proposed banking regulation harms me in any way > That is a great world view. Screw everyone else as long as I'm fine.
Any legally-regulated human activity introduces a trade-off between the amount of effort legitimate actors need to put in to fulfill the requirements of the regulation, and the amount of illegitimate activity that is prevented by the regulation. My assertion is that I already show proof of citizenship in a bunch of bureaucratic contexts in my life, so adding banks to it is not any additional trouble for me. It's only additional trouble if you're in the country illegally, but that is exactly the illegitimate activity that the regulation is intended to curtail.
Needing to get a liquor license to legally operate a bar screws over people who would like to operate an unlicensed bar, but this doesn't mean that someone who already has a liquor license and who politically-supports the existence of liquor licenses is doing anything wrong.
> I'm trying not to go there, but it really seems like you're saying "keep those spanish speaking brown people out of my nice white gated community". There's a word for that.
I agree that gated communities with lots of white people in them are nicer than non-gated ones with lots of brown people in them. I even think this is true in Mexico, where the white people in the gated communities themselves speak Spanish. Indeed, I think the brown, Spanish-speaking Mexicans also noticed this general fact about the world, and this is what induced some of them to illegally immigrate to the US, a place with more white people than Mexico. I don't personally live in a gated community though.