[microgpt]

How can you be sure the opinion moved to the center and not that the center moved to the right?

Migration is all a distraction anyway. Brown people existing doesn't hurt you. Whenever you think they drive up rents or whatever, that has nothing to do with the brown people, that has everything to do with the system that sets rents.

[saberience]

"Brown people existing doesn't hurt you"

Yes, existing doesn't hurt. But when you import mass amounts of people who don't talk your countries language, have no intention of learning, and have no intention of getting a job, and on top of it are intensely religious supporting a religion which is antithetical to your values, then it DOES hurt.

Western Europe has simply allowed too many Muslim immigrants in than they could ever successfully have integrated. Now Europe is full of ghettos of Muslim immigrants who don't get jobs, don't learn the languages, and sap resources which the countries cannot afford.

Note: this isn't about being racist or not, it's just common sense. There is a limit of how many immigrants a country can take, financially and culturally.

[paulryanrogers]

So is the religion the biggest problem or just a symptom?

I'd agree immigration must have limits and don't recall any prominent voices calling for unlimited migration or even limitless compassion.

Being a union, one can hope the load of migrants fleeing wars and violence would be spread among all the states, in proportion to their ability. Economic migration is a more complex matter since everyone benefits from it up to some threshold. Where it crosses into an undeniable problem is subjective. If it negatively affects me personally then it's bad, especially if I can overlook all the benefits I accrued (like lower prices of commodities and services).

[antonkochubey]

Yes, increasing demand for housing and increasing supply of labor definitely does nothing for both salaries and housing prices

[TheOtherHobbes]

Perhaps those problems have other causes.

[saghm]

This may shock you, but not all numbers greater than zero are equal. Something might cause a price to go up by some amount, but something else might make it go up by an even larger amount, so stopping that first thing might not stop it from still going up higher than people want.

[microgpt]

What happens to supply of housing and demand for labor, and why?

[mandevil]

So for housing it depends on the local laws (1), but for labor this has actually been heavily studied, and the general consensus (2) is actually higher demand for native-born labor. All of those immigrants need goods and services, after all, so they increase demand. Focusing on immigrants providing labor without mentioning that they buy things as well is assuming your conclusion.

And the demand is not just for doctors and other highly credentialed labor. The most nativist work on the Mariel Boatlift (3) (by Borjas) only found a decrease in wages for native-born high-school dropouts, and the general consensus of other economists seems to be that his work was faulty. The general consensus on Mariel (cite fn2 again) is that it was good, economically, for the native-born people in the Miami labor force when an additional 7% of the labor force suddenly arrived as immigrants over the course of a few months.

1: How much housing can be built legally is the key factor here. Immigrants can drive up the prices if no more housing can be built but that's just another way of saying that "no more housing can be built" is a really terrible policy that is enormously destructive. If building housing is relatively easy, then it doesn't drive up prices. In fact, immigrant labor is often used to build this new housing. Don't let your area become like the Bay Area and you'll be fine.

2: Wearing my physics hat, I am not comfortable saying that anything in economics is actually proven.

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift

[SmirkingRevenge]

Yep, this is exactly right.

When people are added to the economy, demand increases, including demand for more labor.

The downward pressure on wages that one might intuitively expect from immigrant labor is basically erased by those increases in demand. It's self-reinforcing.

[peyton]

Look up the Curley Effect for an explainer of what might be going on. I’m not Swedish but feel it may be worth examining given their rhetoric.

[microgpt]

Sorry I don't get the reference

[mandevil]

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w8942/w8942...

Some economists theorize that a long time Mayor of Boston (James Curley) used economic populism (taxing wealthy people of English descent and redistributing to poorer, usually of Irish descent) and anti-British rhetoric to reshape the electorate in ways that benefited him, even if it didn't benefit the city as a whole. The theory goes, he had a plan to drive out the wealthy people of English descent so the poor people of Irish descent would make up a larger share of the electorate and he could win more elections.

My understanding is that even most economists think that this isn't actually real. It's largely a couple of economists building a mathematical model, and then looking at cherry-picked examples, e.g., minority mayors during the 1970's and assuming that it was the result of a dastardly plan by the minority mayors rather than the result of larger social forces driving White Flight from cities.

In general, I think that mayors might make dumb decisions, but they largely do it because they think it will be good for the city and are wrong, not because they are twirling their mustache and cackling away.

[saghm]

A discipline that often likes to model things in terms of perfectly rational actors probably will struggle to consider Hanlon's razor

[nathan_compton]

Do you resent it when babies are born?

[nec4b]

> Brown people existing doesn't hurt you.

Why did you feel the need to say "Brown people" instead of migrants? Are you trying to play the racist card? Poles are white and when they migrated en mass to Britain they were also making locals very unhappy.

[nly]

Ironically most of the polish I know who came to Britain returned home to Poland for better prospects.

Adjusting for purchasing power parity, GDP per capita in Poland isn't far behind the UK.

[microgpt]

We all know they are not going to expel Canadians.

[bit-anarchist]

Why not?

[xdennis]

> Brown people existing doesn't hurt you.

BBC:

    About 58% of men convicted in Sweden of rape and attempted rape over the past five years were born abroad, according to data from Swedish national TV.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45269764

[fakedang]

> How can you be sure the opinion moved to the center and not that the center moved to the right?

I'm pretty sure he meant that what used to be a far-right view is now considered mainstream. Which is true, since even the EU Parliament has now begun passing laws vs migrants, and governments all across Western Europe are now taking steps against migrants.

> Brown people existing doesn't hurt you.

Correct, and I'm one of them. Unfortunately some abhorrent elements of our culture, traditions and values hurt erstwhile peaceful societies.

[throwaway85825]

Supply and demand economic denialism is dangerously widespread.

[microgpt]

What is supply and demand economic denialism?

[Auracle]

[flagged]

[dang]

Can you please not post in the flamewar style? You crossed into that here and it's the opposite of what we're trying for on this site. You're welcome to make your substantive points thoughtfully.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[Auracle]

You're right, apologies. I was trying to cut off an argument before it started but I went about it completely wrong.

[decimalenough]

> Brown people existing doesn't hurt you.

In Sweden, brown people are heavily overrepresented in violent crime, so many people are getting hurt.

Obligatory disclaimer: the problem is not caused by skin color, but by a complex mess of poverty, lack of opportunity, societal attitudes within and against immigrant groups, etc. But voters hearing about a steady drum beat of robberies, rapes, drive by shootings (yes, in Sweden!) don't really care.

[tim333]

Culture's a thing too. If you admit a bunch of Somali warlords they may keep behaving like Somali warlords irrespective of the other factors you mention.

[paulryanrogers]

Perhaps voters aren't being offered the tools to solve the root problems?

Scapegoating entire skin colors for systemic failures doesn't seem like it's going to make things better for anyone.

[noworriesnate]

What solution do you have in mind? And is it guaranteed to work? Because deporting the people who are massively over represented in crime is guaranteed to work.

[decimalenough]

Indeed, but scapegoating people who are Different(tm) has a long history of being a successful political tactic, at least if you measure success solely in terms of getting elected.

[exiguus]

That's how populism works and people act if they don't understand that manipulation.

[arjie]

Considering the history of labor unions and their support for the banning of Asian citizenship in the US, I think the right frame is that migration support / opposition has something to do with other things but not entirely. There are only a few ways to come to the US and the employment-based approach is probably the most widely used by unconnected foreigners seeking to live in the US and that pathway is intended to be abolished by Senator Bernie Sanders with no replacement planned. I think it's hard to describe that senator as particularly right-wing.

Likewise, it was a labour union in Georgia that lobbied to get Koreans deported from the US. It should be unsurprising that those who hold to the Lump of Labor economic school should oppose immigration and that's quite popular among the left-wing.

[17761989]

they can exist @ home

[microgpt]

Where's home?

[noworriesnate]

Africa, the Middle East, etc. There’s not just one answer.

[Geonode]

[flagged]

[dang]

Religious flamewar is not allowed on HN so please don't post like this here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[nec4b]

There is one person/bot here with well over 30 comments in this comment section making all about race and racism even though the topic is migration. Don't you have any guidelines about that?

[dang]

Of course we do: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Don't make the mistake of assuming moderator omniscience (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)! - we don't see most of what gets posted to HN, and we mostly don't read the threads sequentially.

[nec4b]

I don't assume you are omniscience, but I do expect you have at least minimal tools/stats where you can see things getting of charts. You did have to find the comment to which you replied and reminded the author of not starting religious wars somehow too.

[dang]

Well, if you expect us to see everything you see which deserves moderator attention, it amounts to the same thing - since "you" here means every user (obviously you're not just asking for yourself personally). That's what I mean by moderator omniscience. It's far beyond our ability.

When this comes up, it's usually because someone (yourself in this case) saw X getting moderated and Y not getting moderated, and derived signal from that, when in fact it is nearly always noise.

By deriving signal, I mean bogus conclusions such as "the mods treat X side harder than Y side", or "the mods must secretly be aligned with Y". This is all non sequitur. Overwhelmingly, what you're seeing is randomness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion) - but especially easy to overinterpret because of the strong feelings generated by the underlying topic.

There's a well-established process for letting the mods know about posts that might need moderator attention - see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[peterfirefly]

I see several pro-mass immigration posters who try to pretend opposition to mass immigration is about racism. Don't think any of them are bots.