[afutd]

This comment is akin to the farmers who tell us we need to subsidize them because without them we will all starve.

There are hundreds of millions of people who would very much like to come to the United States. They are ready and willing to start working and contributing taxes now. We can pick and chose the skills we need, not invest for 22+ years and hope for the best.

We only need the product you are selling because you use your political power to prevent your competitors, with a superior product, from entering the market.

That's predatory behavior, not altruism.

[rayiner]

The irony of appealing to immigration to justify child-hostile policies is that all those immigrants (me included) think westerners are crazy for being so child-hostile. Hispanics in the U.S. have a fertility rate of 3.

[dragonwriter]

> all those immigrants (me included) think westerners are crazy for being so child-hostile.

Westerners in general isn't child-hostile, even if US labor practices are, and many of those immigrants -- including the Hispanic ones -- are Westerners themselves.

[afutd]

If they do all think we westerners are crazy (and I'm certainly not going to take your word for it), that isn't enough of a downside to leave us with a shortage of potential immigrants. Your argument about freeloaders is just plain wrong.

What we have going here is attractive enough that we have people lining up out the door. We don't desperately need you to do us a favor and bless society with your children, despite the fact that every parent seems to think we do.

[rayiner]

You're free-loading either way. You're just arguing about free-loading off parents in India versus the U.S.

[afutd]

It's not freeloading. It's a voluntary trade for value.

In any event, your logic is flawed. A person can easily be a net contributor over a lifetime without having children. And someone who has children, can easily be a net drain even after attributing some of the costs/contributions of the children (which may well also be negative).

[dragonwriter]

> There are hundreds of millions of people who would very much like to come to the United States.

They aren't prevented from coming to the United States by people having children, they are prevented from coming to the United States by US immigration law (either because they are individually undesirable, or because they exceed the hard total or per-country caps in various permitted categories.)

So, relevance here is missing.