The Left and border control / immigration policies

[AqD]

Why is it that most of leftists support lax border control and immigration policies while the right / conservative support the opposite?

Such trend in West politics seems quite illogical - after all the left is for more welfare and the right usually not. Isn't it obvious that the more benefits you provide to residents the stricter entry restrictions you have to apply in order to reduce further waste of national resource, a number of them already having to be allocated to those who can never repay it (e.g. poor elders, serious long term illness or forever unemployed due to minimum salary, etc)? The benefits are, whether they're labeled as essential human right or not, privileges that have to be paid by residents in the form of tax.

It doesn't make sense for the right to support stricter control either - if they have their way, there would be little negative impact if any since the state provides only basic functions - anyone who join would have to integrate and work, like a slave if they have to, because there would be zero support from the government (imagine refugee camps as sweatshops). A 18th century US wouldn't need to block potential immigrants at all.

Am I misunderstanding something here? Or the parties today are completely guided by ideologies with no regard to logic?

[Timoleon of Korinthos]

The Right opposes immigration on economic terms, because, even in the ideal scenario, increasing supply of labor supresses wages and thus adversely impacts the natives - and that is assuming that immigrants do come to work and integrate, rather than form sperate enclaves and keep living off welfare paid for by the native population for generations on end, as happens in practice. Much more importantly, however, the Right opposes immigration, because the influx of alien residents, especially from primitive peoples and cultures, destroyes communal cohesion and undermines national allegience, thereby transforming unified, high-trust societies into sets of easily indoctrinated and dominated individuals. Kind of like the people who are currently watching the statues of their ancestors being torn down, while grooming gangs and terrorists are roaming their cities, and are powerless to stop it, because merely speaking out against it either leads to them being sacked from their jobs and financially ruined or the state apparatus bearing down its full might upon their heads under the pretext of hate speech laws and the likes.

The Left, by contrast, advocates all these things, because the implosion of western countries is exactly what they are aiming for; more precisely, after the collapse of communism and the advent of financialization of the economy, they became the tools for the globalist elites that are setting the goals. The primary goal of the latter is the transplanting of the third world within the first world, as this will permanently and irrevocably enable them to perpetuate rent-seeking through control of the institutions of fiat money economy and to secure dominance over native labor forces, as not even outsourcing will be necessary at this point, while the break-down of society and the demoralization of the natives will finally allow them to loot the assets of the middle class, which is by far the largest repository of physical, tangible wealth in any country. Whites are now openly targeted in the USA and in the UK, precisely because they predominantly comprise the middle class from a demographic perspective.

[Muizer]

Well Aqd, while I won't presume to speak on behalf of "the Left" as a whole, I can start with a suggestion.

Do not take as the position of "The Left" what the right says it is.

Timoleon of Korinthos has kindly provided us with a kind of laughable charicature you'd end up with.

The foundation of this charicature is the false belief that the default state of borders is that they don't let anyone in or out without authorization.

The reality is that boundaries are more or less permeable depending on geographical circumstance, the efforts to keep people out or in, and the pressure on that border.

If you want to keep a border closed in the face of rising pressure, the effort has to go up. We know what that means in the case of the European situation: People leave everything behind and are prepared to risk their life to reach Europe. So, to keep borders closed, you'd have to push those overcrowded inflatable boats back out to sea (or just sink them) and leave people to starve and freeze in no-mans-land, with no prospect of it deterring any newcomers.

That's the point where people on the left say: "we won't stand for that".

Unlike with how the right often tries to spin it, it has nothing to do with seeing immigration as a positive thing in its own right, either economically or culturally. It's an act of altruism, which carries in its meaning an element of self sacrifice.

[Prodromos]

I'm not sure when anti-immigrant sentiment became "right-wing." Opposition to immigration is rooted in a hodgepodge of Marxist economic, environmentalist, racist and nationalist beliefs, none of which are properly conservative in the modern American sense (i.e., conserving the ideals of the Founding). I think most anti-immigrant conservatives just haven't thought their anti-immigrant sentiment through; they feel they have to be anti-immigrant simply because many or most self-described conservatives are anti-immigrant and most self-described leftists are pro-immigrant. A lot of conservatives will answer in a survey that they want to ban refugees but then go out of their way to help refugees in real life. Partisanship is a heck of a thing.

Opinion | Alabama Is More Pro-Immigrant Than You Think

Alabama? This reddest of red states has a reputation for hostility to immigrants — the home of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the infamous HB 56, one of the harshest anti-immigrant laws in the country. Thanks in part to his xenophobic rhetoric, Donald Trump won all 67 counties in the state’s Republican primary.

But there’s something else afoot in Alabama. Time and again during my work as a pastor, I have encountered people with strong anti-immigrant policy positions, who nevertheless open their homes, churches, wallets and arms to immigrants in their communities.

Alabama can be a difficult place to understand, but the role of faith is clear. On policy, people may take their cues from anywhere — their party, their president, Fox News. But in their daily lives, their religious beliefs are their guide.

[Timoleon of Korinthos]

Altruism towards foreigners that despise one's people and culture is cuckoldry, not self-sacrifice; sacrifice has always carried connotations of an act done in service of the community, not a burden imposed upon it. More importantly, there is no altruism in subjecting the native populations to drastically increased rates of physical harm and violent crime in all its forms in exchange for relieving third-worlders from the consequences of their inability to attain high standards of living in their own countries. It is simply another manifestation of a self-destructive ideology impressed on the more malleable and emasculated members of western societies through indoctrination since childhood and, while it is undoubtedly internalized by the tools as a feel-good personal choice, it has been in fact dictated by the higher echelons of the globalist establishment for the reasons I outlined earlier.

Furthermore, having travelled extensively around the Mediterranean, I would like to rectify some misconceptions by stressing that along its coasts the weather is pleasant, the sea is warm and there exists a multitude of towns and cities, whose primary economic function is to provide vastly larger travelling populations with supplies and shelter, also known as tourism.

[Kritias]

The Left in general isn't pro-immigration. There are, however, a few important caveats. Here it goes:

1. Immigration is an economic issue. Certain countries under-develop:this means countries that have the capacity to develop to full blown industrial societies don't - not because they can't, but because they are not allowed to by their own political system or by international pressures, or because of a combination of both. As a result of underdevelopment, the educated workforce is "pulled" and/or «pushed» to work in post-industrial countries like the European countries and the US. A fine example of this process is Turkey which until two decades ago was sending the majority of its skilled workforce as gesterbeiters to Germany and other Central Europe countries. Even now hundreds of thousands of Turks cometo work in Europe every year.

2. Immigration works in support of native specialization. With the economy taking a turn from production to services in 1980s and 1990s, the necessary skills required from the younger workforce changed. Unlike boomers who hardly needed a high school diploma to have a decent job and to support a family, we increasingly need more and more skills to work in a highly specialized economy. The native populations in Europe and America have been following this trend since the 1990s. Just as an example, in 2017 almost 20 million people were studying in tertiary education in EU-28.

However, there are a lot of essential jobs that still need to be done. Illegal immigration helps wonders here; barred from high-skilled work and social protection since they don’t have the necessary papers, undocumented immigrants are left with the most menial tasks in our societies. Cleaning ladies, construction, garbage collecting, prostitution, and a score of low-skill, low-pay jobs are unsually done by undocumented immigrants. There’s a lot of studies conducted in immigration that shows how immigration control works in allocating the immigrant workforce by non-economic parameters that links nationality to work. It’s how you see the Polish working in road construction around the EU; Philippinos usually employed in domestic work; Russian and other eastern Europeans employed in prostitution etc.

2. The majority of immigrants work in atypical markets. Meaning most lack insurance, welfare, unemployment benefits etc What’s more, studies have shown that immigrants working in atypical markets create work values that keep them off the social services. That’s either because they are misinformed of their status, their employer witholds their passport, are involved in patronage schemes, their work visas are short-term with hundreds of cancellation clauses or otherwise convinced that going to social services will lead to their deportation. Only the highly skilled immigrants like doctors, professors etc enjoy the full protection of the law and of social services.

3. Immigration balances off the privitization of education services for high-skill jobs. Take for example education; how many hundreds of thousands of dollars, pounds, or euros will a native get into debt just to finish their tertiary education degree? Now imagine how much more they need for post-grad studies. That’s just half of the bill; for any trained professional, the state and the private institution also share a part. There’s the necessary infrastructure, trained personnel and hundreds of other costs necessary to train you, even if you pay tuition.

When Western societies privitized education services, a lot of the costs became prohibitive for the native working classes. To balance this off, Western societies imported «skilled workforce» from abroad, usually from countries with socialized education systems. This is costing the importer a dime on the dollar to get an already trained professional, while plunging the exporter-country into debt (since the investment made to train the professional isn’t returned to the country that trained them). In this way they can keep making great profits from privitized education services, profits from natives paying off tuition debts, while at the same time balancing off the drop of native skilled workforce with imported skilled workforce.

4. Immigrants aren’t that different from refugees. Similarly to refugees, the economic migrant is also cut off from resources, services, opportunities and life prospects in their home country. No one just decides to leave their country; there’s a process where the person is stripped of everything they have before they leave. Many of them report being trapped by moneylenders, pyramid schemes or payday loan schemes before they left. The easiest example of this is the study Polish Peasant by Thomas and Znaniecky, which documented the immigration of Polish to the United Kingdom and the United States in 1920s.Their work documents the devastation of the agricultural sector in Poland that left them homeless and unemployed before they decided to leave; their initial move to the cities to work as factory workers; the closing of factories and second homelessness and unemployment; and finally their immigration to the West. The Seventh Man by Berger & Mohr also tackles this issue.

5. War accelerates the immigration process. Just an example: when the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, the refugees from that war became immigrants in Greece. Most of them ares till living in the country. During 2020, the refugees trying to cross the land border with Turkey were also Afghani people in their crushing majority; more than ten years after that war and people are still fleeing the country and crossing to Greece. But people were coming from Afghanistan and Iraq to Greece before the war; in fact, their first recorded arrival in the country was in the 1970s.


Having said that, why the Left wants laxer immigration controls:

Strict border controls do not limit immigration flows - in the contrary the stricter the rules the greater the profit for smugglers. The harder, more diffult the crossing from one country to another, the more money the immigrants have to pay the smugglers to get them in.

Strict border controls trap immigrants to atypical work and in patronage schemes. Immigration works with someone from the origin country getting you in contact with a smuggler; the «patron» pays (or possibly not) the fee to the smuggler, which you are promised to work off in the destination country (usually with threats that your family gets it if you don’t). As a result, once you’re through to the destination country, your smuggler will get you into contact with a (usually) native employer who puts you to work. This usually entails little money, your passport taken from you, and constant fear you will be discovered and deported.

Stricter border controls means less control of the economy by the working people, since the less immigrants have rights to unionize the more they act as a «reserve workforce army». This means they can be used by employers to drop all of our wages, break strikes and get native people fired.

Stricter border control means immigrants are funnelled towards atypical work; as a result, their work goes unreported and the profits of their bosses go untaxed. The state usually looses money whenever there’s stricter rules, because stricter rules means more atypical solutions. Therefore they generate money that goes to profits entirely, while it could go to lowering your taxes.

Stricter border controls means radicalization. If you think they are gastly now, think of what they think of you sinking inflatable boats and letting children drown. Think how these images travel the world and how this is just the wrong type of propaganda to be used by those who would want immigrants radicalized.

Lastly, stricter border controls means not taking responsibility. If you dropped the bombs that made them refugees, then it’s your problem to take care of them. No one else’s.

PS. There’s a lot of other reasons too which don’t rhyme with self-sacrifice or altruism. Generally, I am very cautious when I hear such arguments. Having read Pareto’s Rise and Fall of the Elites might be why.

[Aexodus]

I wanna kick this off by asking if border controls physically don't work at limiting the flow of people then how has New Zealand managed to keep its borders shut for two months.

[Kritias]

Well, I assume that the last two months the COVID-19 pandemic helped a lot on that front. I would answer that Greece, its army deployed at the borders and navy repelling rafts making the crossing still had to accept around 150,000 immigrants in the space of two months.

[Aexodus]

https://www.dailysabah.com/politics/...ter-soylu-says

Okay, and did they not repel a lot of migrants too? You have to admit that is an unusual case, where Turkey suddenly began letting migrants pour into Europe.

[Timoleon of Korinthos]

I would answer that Greece, its army deployed at the borders and navy repelling rafts making the crossing still had to accept around 150,000 immigrants in the space of two months.

I would join the discussion to point out that this is a made up figure, since, as per standard practice, the Hellenic Police will only release immigration statistics for 2020 after the end of the year. I would also add that this figure is probably inflated by at least one or two orders of magnitude, given that 123'710 and 93'367 are the numbers of immigrants arrested for illegal entry during the entirety of 2019 and 2018 respectively, when nor the land border with Turkey was shut neither did the coast guard carry out pushbacks at sea. Detailed information can be found here.

[antaeus]

I wanna kick this off by asking if border controls physically don't work at limiting the flow of people then how has New Zealand managed to keep its borders shut for two months.

It's kind of hard to walk to New Zealand. A moat helps. But if you take a boat, you still have a good shot at crossing the border unchecked. A chunk of New Zealand's illicit drug imports come via boat from more lax countries in the pacific - and people who love their heroin don't seem to be going completely without at the moment. New Zealand's ocean borders are some of the longest in the world, and they literally only have a few hundred people patrolling them at any moment. Literally thousands of people "self check in" with customs each year after taking pacific holidays by boat.

I.e. the majority of the success of New Zealand's hard border is because it's so hard to get there.



Back on topic...

I don't think immigration and border controls are strictly left or right issues. Around the world border controls are championed by people on both sides of the spectrum, and have changed over time so that a current left leaning leader who is lax on borders, might have followed a previous tough on borders left leaning leader.

We align ourselves to the full cluster of issues that our favourite politician speaks to. As is the case with many currently left or right issues.

I would go as far as to suggest that those who see border issues only through a left/right axis betray themselves as unable to see beyond their own cognitive bias.

[Coughdrop addict]

In a great irony, the worldview of those conservatives who fear immigration (those for whom it isn't solely about skin color anyway) is Marxist. They believe that in all things “winners” must be balanced by corresponding “losers.”

Hear me out. By this I mean that the modern US conservative desire for immigration restriction (or an outright ban), is based on the Marxist model of the economy as zero-sum. That is, they believe the economy is a fixed pie that cannot be grown, therefore every gain by someone must take from someone else. The only way an immigrant can succeed is by preventing someone already here from doing so. Every immigrant with a job is stealing a job from a native-born American.

This also explains their attraction to tariffs. They believe that for another country to grow wealthier, America has to grow poorer. For example, China has gone from having 46% of it's population living on less than a dollar a day, to only having 1% in such grinding poverty. According to conservative/Marxist thinking, they must have stolen all of that wealth from the US, leading to a corresponding decline in US living standards.

Any economist will tell you that this is simply not the case. If, in the absence of cheating, deception, or coercion, two individuals or two nations exchange goods or services, it can be only because each party to the exchange values, at least at the time of the exchange, what is obtained more than what is exchanged. Each anticipates enjoying a more valued situation by making the exchange than they had before making the exchange. There are two winners, not one. This is a positive-sum, rather than a zero-sum game.

Similarly, an immigrant with a job creates more jobs by contributing to the economy and being able to afford things they couldn't before. Unless said immigrant grows all of their own food, makes all of their own clothes, and is in every way 100% self-sufficient, they are contributing and creating more demand. No jobs are being stolen, rather demand is creating more jobs.

This Marxist, zero-sum worldview is also reflected in some conservative's views of social change and minority rights. They tend to believe that educational, political and economic gain for minorities must come at the expense of white male political power, economic gain and education. But once again this just isn't so. Minority political, educational and economic opportunity has expanded at no one’s loss. Women getting the vote didn't make men lose it. The civil rights movement didn't result in whites having their own version of Jim Crow. Gay marriage didn't make heterosexual marriage illegal.

I think that this Marxist, zero-sum worldview is behind much of their hostility. If you truly believe that things like immigration, the economy, and civil rights are zero-sum, then it is perfectly logical to try and seize as much as possible for one's self and group while at the same time attempting to crush anyone else under foot. That's the great irony in all of this. While they call anyone they don't like a Marxist and declare themselves staunch capitalist, they have adopted a Marxist view themselves. Horseshoe theory in action.

[Muizer]

Well that's nicely said, but there's still a price to pay: The main problem with absorbing immigration is that the cultural friction it causes primarily affects those who benefit least from any macro-economic plus. This creates a cheap consituency for the conservative elite: instead of costly measures (not least to their own class) of addressing growing financial inequality, they can get their votes with empty words blaming 'the foreigner'.

[AqD]

Similarly, an immigrant with a job creates more jobs by contributing to the economy and being able to afford things they couldn't before. Unless said immigrant grows all of their own food, makes all of their own clothes, and is in every way 100% self-sufficient, they are contributing and creating more demand. No jobs are being stolen, rather demand is creating more jobs.

This Marxist, zero-sum worldview is also reflected in some conservative's views of social change and minority rights. They tend to believe that educational, political and economic gain for minorities must come at the expense of white male political power, economic gain and education. But once again this just isn't so. Minority political, educational and economic opportunity has expanded at no one’s loss. Women getting the vote didn't make men lose it. The civil rights movement didn't result in whites having their own version of Jim Crow. Gay marriage didn't make heterosexual marriage illegal.

That might be working in US but apparently not so well in socialist countries such as Sweden (with high percentage of them being refugees). A view I came across a while ago was that their culture has grown far too different from that of natives and the lack of abundant low skilled job coupled with extensive welfare (and the unavoidable dependency on it) causes frustration and resistance to integration.

However, there are a lot of essential jobs that still need to be done. Illegal immigration helps wonders here; barred from high-skilled work and social protection since they don’t have the necessary papers, undocumented immigrants are left with the most menial tasks in our societies. Cleaning ladies, construction, garbage collecting, prostitution, and a score of low-skill, low-pay jobs are unsually done by undocumented immigrants. There’s a lot of studies conducted in immigration that shows how immigration control works in allocating the immigrant workforce by non-economic parameters that links nationality to work. It’s how you see the Polish working in road construction around the EU; Philippinos usually employed in domestic work; Russian and other eastern Europeans employed in prostitution etc.

Wouldn't the wage simply raise if there is demand but no supply through immigration? Since they're essential jobs they're unlikely to create further value.

At least before foreign work force was introduced, being a construction worker or plumber earns as much as mid-level manager or professionals in East Asia - it might still do now.

Having said that, why the Left wants laxer immigration controls:

Strict border controls do not limit immigration flows - in the contrary the stricter the rules the greater the profit for smugglers. The harder, more diffult the crossing from one country to another, the more money the immigrants have to pay the smugglers to get them in.

Strict border controls trap immigrants to atypical work and in patronage schemes. Immigration works with someone from the origin country getting you in contact with a smuggler; the «patron» pays (or possibly not) the fee to the smuggler, which you are promised to work off in the destination country (usually with threats that your family gets it if you don’t). As a result, once you’re through to the destination country, your smuggler will get you into contact with a (usually) native employer who puts you to work. This usually entails little money, your passport taken from you, and constant fear you will be discovered and deported.

Stricter border controls means less control of the economy by the working people, since the less immigrants have rights to unionize the more they act as a «reserve workforce army». This means they can be used by employers to drop all of our wages, break strikes and get native people fired.

Stricter border control means immigrants are funnelled towards atypical work; as a result, their work goes unreported and the profits of their bosses go untaxed. The state usually looses money whenever there’s stricter rules, because stricter rules means more atypical solutions. Therefore they generate money that goes to profits entirely, while it could go to lowering your taxes.

Stricter border controls means radicalization. If you think they are gastly now, think of what they think of you sinking inflatable boats and letting children drown. Think how these images travel the world and how this is just the wrong type of propaganda to be used by those who would want immigrants radicalized.

I found those quite hard to believe. Countries could easily replace smugglers with legal agencies formed by the government to take in needed workforce (justified or not). When there are legal ways people would prefer it over the illegal and risky ones - there are many SE asians doing this in Singapore or Japan, for example.

And strict border control is definitely working in some of better off countries in Asia.

Lastly, stricter border controls means not taking responsibility. If you dropped the bombs that made them refugees, then it’s your problem to take care of them. No one else’s.

Yet most of the left have zero interest in actively helping them move toward a stable and functional government. I suppose they feel the same responsibility because they advocated democracy in other countries which then turned into pile of wrecks

The Right opposes immigration on economic terms, because, even in the ideal scenario, increasing supply of labor supresses wages and thus adversely impacts the natives - and that is assuming that immigrants do come to work and integrate, rather than form sperate enclaves and keep living off welfare paid for by the native population for generations on end, as happens in practice. Much more importantly, however, the Right opposes immigration, because the influx of alien residents, especially from primitive peoples and cultures, destroyes communal cohesion and undermines national allegience, thereby transforming unified, high-trust societies into sets of easily indoctrinated and dominated individuals. Kind of like the people who are currently watching the statues of their ancestors being torn down, while grooming gangs and terrorists are roaming their cities, and are powerless to stop it, because merely speaking out against it either leads to them being sacked from their jobs and financially ruined or the state apparatus bearing down its full might upon their heads under the pretext of hate speech laws and the likes.

That would be very interesting if you apply it to US - white people did destroy nearly all of American Indian cultures and communal cohesion (to be fair it's more of a side effect of them being dead).

But why are new immigrants today seen as radically different from early immigrants? If the US founders held the same view there might be a handful of citizens in States today.

[Coughdrop addict]

Well that's nicely said, but there's still a price to pay: The main problem with absorbing immigration is that the cultural friction it causes primarily affects those who benefit least from any macro-economic plus. This creates a cheap consituency for the conservative elite: instead of costly measures (not least to their own class) of addressing growing financial inequality, they can get their votes with empty words blaming 'the foreigner'.

And that is the fault of the conservative voter, not the immigrant merely trying to survive. Conservative voters allow themselves to be used in that way. Until they decide to stop taking the easy way and blaming all of their problems on dark-skinned others, they will continue to be victimized by the Republican party's lies and plots.

[Kritias]

I would join the discussion to point out that this is a made up figure, since, as per standard practice, the Hellenic Police will only release immigration statistics for 2020 after the end of the year. I would also add that this figure is probably inflated by at least one or two orders of magnitude, given that 123'710 and 93'367 are the numbers of immigrants arrested for illegal entry during the entirety of 2019 and 2018 respectively, when nor the land border with Turkey was shut neither did the coast guard carry out pushbacks at sea. Detailed information can be found here.

That's not entirely true. The Greek Police is also accused of carrying extra-judiciary pushbacks [1] which definitely scew numbers. Just two days after the crisis begun, officials reported having pushed back 10,000 people while Turkey claimed more than 76,000 people had crossed the borders [2]. Just days before January 2020, a full month before the crisis, officials were saying almost 41,000 had been received in Q3-Q4 or 2019, and they were expecting at the minimum 100,000 people in the next few months [3]. The latest reports from all international newsites claim that people, numbers ranging from 100,000 to 200,000, have entered Greece in Q1, Q2 2020. This is where the numbers come from.

https://www.dailysabah.com/politics/...ter-soylu-says

Okay, and did they not repel a lot of migrants too? You have to admit that is an unusual case, where Turkey suddenly began letting migrants pour into Europe.

Of course they did. The infamous white vans for example (see above for more). However, saying that an immigration policy of closed borders works without taking into account that there's also a pandemic with closed borders throughout the world is also an unusual case, wouldn't you agree?

Wouldn't the wage simply raise if there is demand but no supply through immigration? Since they're essential jobs they're unlikely to create further value.

Not really. The reason for this is political economy. Meaning political decisions scewing the free market forces shaping wages through the law and demand principles. It's the same reason why countries shift economic models from production to services, downsizing and making occupations reduntant. The problem isn't that countries need immigration to work these jobs; the problem is that countries allow private corporations to make huge profits while creating massive unemployment for the native populations. The literature shows how the move from production to services gave rise to the so-called 'migrant jobs'.

I found those quite hard to believe. Countries could easily replace smugglers with legal agencies formed by the government to take in needed workforce (justified or not). When there are legal ways people would prefer it over the illegal and risky ones - there are many SE asians doing this in Singapore or Japan, for example.

And strict border control is definitely working in some of better off countries in Asia.

They could, they just don't want to spend money on it. European countries that accept migrants turned these migrant flows into cash cows since the Union pays through the nose for the immigrants to be held back; it's the reason the Greek government wants permanent detention camps, too. Imagine that aside the cash benefits from the EU, these camps also provide work in local communities since guards, wards, catering positions are filled by local communities. It's telling that the first camp in Greece is in Leros, where an insane asylum used to run until early 2000s.

And the informal economy flourishes, too. So long people pay their taxes at the end, the economy is moving with 'black money' creating new jobs, the scheme is running great.

Yet most of the left have zero interest in actively helping them move toward a stable and functional government. I suppose they feel the same responsibility because they advocated democracy in other countries which then turned into pile of wrecks

Yes and no. I don't think the Left has any ethical qualms about immigrants, but they have more qualms than the right. What is happening is that these people are being exploited right, left and centre. But the right uses populist rhetoric that actually motivates people to attack them so that they shut up and sit down and do what they are told, while the left at least turns to civil society and says to people to refrain from adding to immigrant's woes. But no, the Left, at least internationally, doesn't seem very pre-occupied with solving the reasons these people are coming over.

Keep in mind that the USSR, that is the authoritarian left, was famously anti-immigration. I haven't seen any Left governments either who are overly eager to tackle immigration; they simply limit themselves to curb their native population's worst excesses towards these people.

[Timoleon of Korinthos]

That would be very interesting if you apply it to US - white people did destroy nearly all of American Indian cultures and communal cohesion (to be fair it's more of a side effect of them being dead).

Indeed they did and, in my view as a Greek outsider, that's a great thing, because one group of people was only ever capable of hunting buffaloes and other tribesmen with bows and arrows, whereas the other tamed the land and evolved into the industrial and scientific powerhouse of the world, out of which technology and prosperity disseminates towards the rest, or at least used to. Regardless, you would understand why the prospect of sharing the fate of the native Americans would be alarming to some people.

But why are new immigrants today seen as radically different from early immigrants?

1) Because most are not of the same stock as the WASPs, they are not even ethnic whites, who can maybe assimilate to a watered-down version of being American.
2) Because most either carry ethnic grievances and outright hate/envy America or that very least do not want to assimilate and abandon their religious, ethnic, linguistic and cultural identities. Which is how America lost California to demographics, in spite of lofty ideals about "melting pots" and the likes.
3) Because even if they wanted to, what would these immigrants assimilate to in America today? Civic nationalism? The Constitooootion? That's just ideology and a set of procedures, it does not bind people together who don't already agree in their fundamental worldview and have next to nothing in common in terms of phenotype and culture. Which is why you get even members of the Congress cheering on the burning down of American cities, the dismantling of their institutions and the vilification of American history.

Any economist will tell you that this is simply not the case.

And we would not care, because economics is not a science and economists are modern day astrologers. They can predict almost nothing and they can be used to construct conflicting interpretations of even past occurrences. The reason for this is that not only is economics partly normative in nature, but even the aspects that are strictly mathematical are most statistical (like econometrics) and always severely limited by the inability to formulate models complex enough to describe economy as the extremely multivariate system that it is. Statistics without physics = charlatanism.

The crux of the matter is that outsourcing of industries and influx of cheap immigrants lead to the decoupling of growth in productivity from growth of real wages, which have stagnated in the last 40 or so years, for the first time ever in American history. And this one of the culprits for the current social break-down and unprecedented polarization that we are witnessing, the other side of the drastic increase in the Chinese living standards, which is undoubtedly a great development, if you are a Chinese, or if you are Jeff Bezos in America, but not so great if you are resident of the Rust Belt or a minimum wage laborer at New Jersey McDonald's. And while 1st semester introduction to micro-economics will tell you that free and willing exchange between two parties can only generate "total surplus", otherwise it wouldn't be taking place, it is not going to tell how this is going to be divided between producer and consumer surplus, neither how is each of the latter going to be distributed, given that the parties are not in fact monolithic entities like in theory, if a few hundred billionaires are going to hug all the benefits, while millions of middle and lower class Americans net the loss; the economic theory itself can't predict that. Neither can it predict how are the supply and demand curves going to evolve in the long term, if the consumers are going to have the same consumption power after 40 years of erosion of their industrial capacity and their function as producers. Even more importantly, economics maintains a very restrictive view, because it does not and can not incorporate any aspects of strategic concern, national security and system anti-fragility. It's not going to tell you that once you lose your industrial capacity "because competitive advantage, haven't you heard of Ricardo?", you will be beholden to China for importing masks to combat the spread of a virus that you contracted from China, intentionally on their behalf, or that if you lose the know-how and technology of production of goods, it's extremely difficult to get it back. You would think that the ruthless Chinese mercantilism, the 2008 crash and the Corona virus crisis would have taught American liberals a couple of things about globalism, or at the very least that American life expectancy being on the decline for years now would alert them to something having gone wrong, but apparently they are cultists.

Anyway, back to the topic of immigration, for those of you who are the type of person that respects appeals to authority, here's an analysis by a top authority in the field, George J. Borjas, Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the Harvard University, which reviews historical data to conclude that influx of immigrants always hurts the native working class (as one would expect from the fundamentals of supply and demand mechanics). You are welcome.

Nonetheless, I have to admit that Coughdrop did get something right. Marx was also against immigration on economic terms for the exact same reason, which is why always so funny to see modern day leftists and self-proclaimed Marxists to champion immigration without realizing what tools they are (or maybe they do, but don't care, because they cuckolds anyway, I dunno).

That's not entirely true. The Greek Police is also accused of carrying extra-judiciary pushbacks [1] which definitely scew numbers. Just two days after the crisis begun, officials reported having pushed back 10,000 people while Turkey claimed more than 76,000 people had crossed the borders [2]. Just days before January 2020, a full month before the crisis, officials were saying almost 41,000 had been received in Q3-Q4 or 2019, and they were expecting at the minimum 100,000 people in the next few months [3]. The latest reports from all international newsites claim that people, numbers ranging from 100,000 to 200,000, have entered Greece in Q1, Q2 2020. This is where the numbers come from.

"Expect" does not mean "accept" or "receive", hence the shutting of the land borders and the push-backs at sea. Furthermore, I don't care about what number Turkey is giving, since they have no means of counting those who leave Turkish shores, unless they are organizing them and directing them themselves, no means of counting those who are intercepted by Greek authorities and those who manage to make it to Greece, but they do have an incentive to inflate the figures, since this is their way of pressuring the EU for more gibs. Neither do I care about what figures do Danish blondies working for nebulous NGOs report to the Deutsche Welle, since they wouldn't know either and they essentially echo Turkish claims. The only one who is in a position to and does actually keep tally are the Greek authorities, the police and the coast guard.

[Kritias]

"Expect" does not mean "accept" or "receive", hence the shutting of the land borders and the push-backs at sea. Furthermore, I don't care about what number Turkey is giving, since they have no means of counting those who leave Turkish shores, unless they are organizing them and directing them themselves, no means of counting those who are intercepted by Greek authorities and those who manage to make it to Greece, but they do have an incentive to inflate the figures, since this is their way of pressuring the EU for more gibs. Neither do I care about what figures do Danish blondies working for nebulous NGOs report to the Deutsche Welle, since they wouldn't know either and they essentially echo Turkish claims. The only one who is in a position to and does actually keep tally are the Greek authorities, the police and the coast guard.

I think the statements of the Turkish government and the plethora of videos circulating the web have demostrated beyond reasonable doubt that they indeed organized and directed the passing of the immigrants from Turkey to Greece. They report that more than a 150,000 persons have passed successfully. The Greek government has repeatedly claimed that no one entered Greek territory, a claim that has been shown to be false. Who are these people who are collected by the white vans if not immigrants who crossed the border illegally? The Greek authorities are not actually keeping tally since a) the asylum process was suspended for a month and asylum seekers weren't registered anywhere, b) there's talk of extra-judicial pushbacks (which are not registered anywhere) and c) the Greek government also has reason to lie and deflate the figures to propagandise the 'success' of the new government.

As the situation stands, I trust mostly the international sources that fall somewhere between Turkish and Greek claims.

Nonetheless, I have to admit that Coughdrop did get something right. Marx was also against immigration on economic terms for the exact same reason, which is why always so funny to see modern day leftists and serf-proclaimed Marxists to champion immigration without realizing what tools they are (or maybe they do, but don't care, because they cuckolds anyway, I dunno).

Again, the Left in general isn't in favour of immigration. The system we live under regenerates it, makes huge profit from it and creates the necessary push & pull factors that create it in the first place. Trying to bend the worse excesses of people trying to attack immigrants, as if they are not exploited enough that they'd need the jackboot crushing them too, is worlds apart from your explainations of 'cuckoldry'.

[Aexodus]

So capitalism is to blame for illegal immigration? That is of course, ‘the system’ you mentioned.

We got there in the end.

[Kritias]

So capitalism is to blame for illegal immigration? That is of course, ‘the system’ you mentioned.

We got there in the end.

Not capitalism per se, but the latest manifestation of debtfare capitalism characterized by the shift from production to services. In the UK for example, you can actually see the trend of migration spiking under Thatcher from 1981 until 1985, and then the contunuous increase since 1991 irregardless of government. Again, after 1990s, we witnessed the full dismantling of production capabilities in the UK (mines, shipyards etc), the gentrification of industrial places such as Jarrow and Gateshead, and the general transition to services.

Also, I don't see how one could argue capitalism isn't the primary factor of international interventions around the world that is destablizing countries and disposessing hundreds of thousands of people. The classification of 'illegality' is a by-product of the system, as are the push & pull factors that drive people to immigrate.

Don't get me wrong; capitalism has a lot of benefits. However, we have unfortunately passed from the capitalism of the affluent worker and the classless society of the 50s and have found ourselves in a situation where the majority of the population cannot save more than a 1000 euros, most cannot afford any emergency spending, and everybody is precariously employed in redundant or soon to be redundant occupations. The continuous infux of immigrants is a byproduct of a much wider phenomenon, and blaming only them for what the political economy has created for us is (to me) wrong.