Person A: I support high levels of immigration.
Person B: Weren't you complaining about wages being too low? High levels of immigration directly impact wage growth in a negative way.
Person A: Yeah, but we don't have enough people to care for and replace baby boomers, so we need those immigrants.
Besides telling boomers to get rekt, what's your initial response?
Obviously, it's hypocritical to dissuade citizens from having children, and then turning around and saying we don't have enough people so we need more immigrants.
But I feel like I'm missing something here and can't quite put my finger on it.
It's the Magic Dirt theory of immigration.
That's a good point.
It also harms the countries the immigrants are leaving via brain drain.
Yeah, this isn't the case. Countries basically don't want to deal with a violent criminal so they give them two options: rot in jail or pretend to be a migrant and never come back.
Illegal immigrants are rapists, criminals, pedophiles, the worst of the society they are thrown out of. The only thing 'harming' the country they leave is that they eventually make the country look bad when they get caught in a first world country pulling the same shit.
These shithole countries absolutely love the ability to put all their worst citizens on a boat and make it our problem.
"And some of them are good people!"
But the topic is about high levels of immigration in general, not just Illegal immigrants. The brain drain is real, or was in the past with the self-selection process of having to be intelligent or industrious enough to legally immigrate, depending on what country you were from and its quotas, though the whole mass immigration and "refugee" paradigm has eliminated that by removing those barriers.
I'm referring to actual immigrants who are doctors, business professionals, etc., who go through the legal process.
Obviously the hoards of people who show up at the border claiming to be asylum seekers are not part of the brain drain side of things.
Then they need to be more specific when they say "high levels of immigration."
It's sort of like when sluts whine about abortion using the "what about rape or incest?!" as a gotcha. There's nothing stopping anyone from making it law that rape and incest are exceptions, but they dishonestly use the 2% of all abortions to justify the other vast vast majority of elective personal convenience abortions.
By the way, we do [the US does] have visa programs for skilled people. Those quotas are generally quite small. And, even then, why would a doctor or lawyer move here when the tax man is going to make him work for four months out of the year for free so that money can be handed over to the hoard of illegal immigrants who are barely literate in their native language?
They want to come because the average US physician makes more money than any other country, and the taxes are still lower than most countries where they'd consider living. The US is going to shit, but for now it's still extremely desirable compared to alternatives.
But I suppose with the way medical schools are heading here in the US (all the DIE/equity bullshit), I should probably be happy that doctors are moving here from other countries.
To be fair, the smart ones leave as soon as possible.
A case I'm very familar with is the Gulf War of 1991. Many highly educated investors, engineers and doctors fled or left Iraq before the war started since they sensed the end of Iraq as a strong state. Some choose to ride it out, but noticed a sharp decline in everything requiring actual specialist or capital.
They are still subpar and cause more harm. Look at who is making the medical mistakes. Spoiler, it's foreigners.
Hey now, occasionally they're just plain old con artists and charlatans! It's not like utter frauds and swindlers would EVER do any damage to our nations, right? (/s)
It's important to always remember that leftists are materialists.
"But if we halt immigration, then GDP goes down, and then we have less money, and then we have less material things and comforts!"
Ok, even ignoring for a minute that that's not how it works, then ok. Yes. So what?
You can only win arguments against marxists by steering the conversation away from materialistic goals.
Are we in danger of starvation? No? Then material goods are immaterial.
The goal isn't creating a world with more consoomtion or even material comfort, the goal is safety, community, and high trust.
Tell them that if they can point to a diverse society that is as safe, with the same sense of community, belonging, solidarity, compassion, and trust as places like Japan or Norway - then sure, ok, let's do that then. But until they can, kindly shut the fuck up.
Short answer: The immigrants aren't going to look after the boomers.
The family conscious ones will be sending resources back for their boomer family in the home country. And the more self-centred ones will either be sucking up care resources themselves or the first to suggest pulling the plug on boomers to save themselves the work/cost. After all, why should they sacrifice their comfort for a bunch of old people the have no cultural or familial connection with?
Plus if the system needs more than 1:1 birth rates to accommodate elderly care adequately, then you're just kicking the can down the road and eventually magnifying the problem by importing immigrants. Because they're going to grow old and expect to be cared for too, except there'll be even more elderly to somehow look after.
Immigration takes a toll on culture, national identity, leads to identity politics abuses and conflicts, my kids will get discriminated against for being white and looking at Sweden - Malmo in particular, France, UK and US I do not like the consequences of immigration. This on top of housing market spikes and stagnating income for low skill work that is creating increase disparities between rich and poor. Can you imagine growing in London 30 years ago and being 80-87% of the city British and now be bellow 40%, is that even an English city?
The question should not be how to take care of baby boomers, it should be what is the cost. Are we willing to sacrifice and accept all the issues above so that baby boomers have 10% better life? Are baby boomers on-board with this?
Granted, at this point it no longer matters, the sad truth is that marxists won.
What is crazy is that you will be attacked for saying that a country should be allowed to make their own immigration policy. I guess we technically have one but it’s ignored. I remember the media went crazy because Trump said Immigration should be based on what skills you have to offer
I'm not asking for much.
I'll just want the same immigration policies as, say, Mexico. Or Canada, before they started gushing about letting in all those poor refugee migrants.
Yeah, try to illegally enter Mexico and see what happens. Hell, try it in Canada, as a white person. Please. Spoilers: It's not going to go as well as liberals think it would...
I remember showing how strict immigration is in Mexico to someone and they were shocked. In theory Canada has skills based immigration right?
Skill based, and if you have any type of criminal record, they'll deny you automatically, just off the top of my head.
I also recall antecedent mentions of immigrants always constantly getting checked by Mounties, much more than they ever did living in America.
There's old 'askreddit' threads floating around about redditors trying to emigrate to Canada post-Trump election and getting rudely introduced to reality.
I've seen my company try to secure skilled worker visas in Canada and they were all denied. And we're talking about very skilled IT workers who would pay a fuck ton of taxes. (as would we as the employer)
Refugees are considered to be outside the immigration system which is fucked up. I don't see how asylum can continue to exist unless you just arbitrarily limit it to a small slice of people you for whatever reason favor.
Boomers: fuck my kids, I’m spending all my money before I die lol
Also boomers: why is there no one here to care for me in my old age?
Also also boomers: I’m gonna import a bunch of foreigners to take care of me, who cares if they lower wages and raise prices for my kids, those ungrateful shits abandoned me
Has there been a worse generation?
Yes, Millennials. Obviously.
Millennials: Fuck kids! Either abort 'em, or groom 'em. And fuck this country. And fuck civilization. And fuck other people. And fuck my family. I hate everything because I deserve everything and not enough was simply given to me. I'M ENOUGH REASON, DAMNIT!
Also Millennials: Why can't I have kids at 45! Menopause is a Social Construct! 55 is the new 35! Why won't someone marry me and give me their shit! Why is society making me so unhappy!
Also Also Millennials: I'm going to import a bunch of foreigners because I hate this country. My neighbors are all torries or trumpists and should get their heads kicked in. That foreign guy makes slightly spicier food, and I feel like a good person when people tell me I do good things without contemplating consequences. I don't give a shit if they fucking rape me. For some unknowable and horrific reason, I secretly fantasize about it because my life is complete and total shit. I wish I was aborted.
The Boomers were dumb. But the Millennials might actually be the worst generation in human history.
I'm also a millennial.
It's not "world dooming power". It's the fact that an entire generation is basically comprised of resentment-mongers acting like civilizational school-shooters. "Nothing has meaning, so I'll kill the world and then myself in my war against God" is not any kind of a healthy attitude. It's not like a millennial can press a button and detonate the nukes, it's the "shopping cart problem" at scale, and with magnified intensity.
A nice store can exist in a world where people put their shopping carts back because they are taking personal responsibility to enforce a moral system. When people don't put anything back, they aren't taking responsibility, and you see that reflected with the extra effort that stores have to take to round-up carts, put back store items, and do additional cleaning. But what if it wasn't just that people just didn't put the carts back, but actively broke them, stole them, smashed them into cars, dumped things off shelves, and told the staff to kill themselves? That store would be fucking hell.
That's what we're in. Boomers didn't put the carts back because carts were oppressive; Gen X didn't either because "it's just a cart and nothing matters"; Millennials went fucking bananas and declared that the only way to finally defeat cart oppression was to actively destroy carts and if you aren't destroying carts, you're supporting them. Now the store is on fire, Gen X wants to know how this effects them personally, Boomers are claiming they are only one step away from being liberated from cart oppression, and the Millennials are in the deli cutting themselves and demanding to know why the Boomers are stopping them from revolting against the carts. Our civilization was decaying slowly, until it decayed fucking quickly. We live in fucking clown world, and it didn't look this bad even before GamerGate.
Eh, I guess I feel like the millennials never would have happened without the boomers.
Too many things can be blamed on the failings of previous generations, but eventually some generation or other is going to have to try to turn things around or watch everything go off a cliff.
Many of Gen Z are worse, but there's also a ton that are better. Basically, their issue is that they are young and indoctrinated, but not to the near homogenous level that Millennials were. So, they are going to become much more conservative by population over the coming decades.
Good thing Millennials are powerless and don't have access to the Big Red Button.
Boomers do, however, and they don't care if they die in nuclear hellfire. They've already lived long, fulfilling lives.
Different problem. Only specific elites want a nuclear exchange. Boomers stupidly undermined civilization and trusted intuitions that were designed to enslave them. There's a ton of millennials that see enslavement to authority as a categorical imperative. The numbers of millennials whom are looking to smash your local neighborhood is a much more serious problem than the number of Boomers that are super sure their pensions are going to come through.
I like living around people who look kinda like me, speak the same language as me, and generally see the world the same way as me.
I also like the idea that my neighbors' kids (and mine if I had them) when they grow up jobs available to them. And I don't think they should have to lower their expectations for wages and quality of life because they're competing for those jobs with people used to a drastically lower quality of life. Because if we aren't trying to give our kids a better quality of life than we ourselves have, then what the hell are we doing this all for?
Honestly I think what you're missing is these questions aren't hard. Group and territory formation is one of the very first things humans must have done, because it's something that other primates do. And records of large cities go back a very long time in human history, so it can't be hard.
We're told it has to be hard, but the people telling us this don't have our best interests in mind.
Not only living a lower quality of life but sending money back home. They're effectively supporting a bigger family, more cheaply than you can. They can come to the US, birth some children, and retire to the old country when they get old.
There's always a poorer person somewhere in the world. Borders are how you keep being a rich country.
It’s important to point out the only reason that argument can be made in the first place is because western birth rates have all fallen below the replacement rate.
Poison in the environment has dropped sperm levels by 60% in just 40 years:
https://www.nicswell.co.uk/health-news/western-sperm-counts-halved-in-last-40-years#:~:text=unselected%20Western%20men%20had%20a,to%20137.5%20million%20in%202011
Mental poisons such as these have likewise had their effects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/infact/antinatalism-population-climate-b2001946.html#:~:text=According%20to%20advocacy%20group%20Stop,animals%2C%20and%20the%20natural%20world.
While not explicitly an argument against immigration, fixing our birth rates would remove the “need” (manufactured yes but real nonetheless) for the discussion entirely
I think this is cope. Sperm counts have dropped because men have become fat and sedentary. Both of these things are directly correlated with low fertility and T levels. We've known this for centuries, if not millennia.
It's the same reason women are having such a hard time carrying to term. They blame it on a mysterious outbreak of "PCOS", which is just a polite way of saying you're so fat your ovaries are falling apart.
If you're fit and regularly exercise and still have low sperm counts, sure, blame microplastics. But I'd bet 99% of people with idiopathic fertility problems are at least 60 pounds overweight.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7807371/
Literally the next sentence lol - y’know, the same reason we don’t have double blind safety studies for vaccines
All that sentence says is “There’s supporting evidence, we swear! It’s just really hard to get!”
And that confounds you?
It confounds me that you think you have a point.
Person B: You live in a civilization. That's supposed to be your job to care for the people who bore you. Did you just assume that when you get older, you would support your family abandoning you to a nursing home? Or, did you hope that you could save enough for your retirement to buy a robot to care for you?
Wait, you've been saving money for retirement for the past 20 years, right? Surely you're not stupid enough to expect to retire on a company pension plan, receive social security, or even transmit intergenerational wealth, are you? I mean, none of the government programs are sustainable, the company programs will be cut at the first sign of trouble, and even without a death tax, inflation and living costs are going to make any of the money you do save used up within a few years. Please tell me you aren't so absolutely retarded as to think you'll have 10 years of no-income retirement, right? Whether it's nursing homes, robots, or immigrants, you'll only be able to afford 2 years of that shit tops. You know it's not unreasonable for a nursing home to cost $10,000 a year, right? Excluding medical costs, you have $100,000 saved for 10 year retirement, right?
Well, shit. It sounds like the easiest thing for you to do is have your kids take care of you when you get older. Oh, but wait, you didn't take care of your parents... so why would they take care of you? Why would they even know to take care of you? You taught them taking care of you would be burden... didn't you?
Well, since you don't have the money for immigrants running nursing homes, it sounds like the only way that your kids will have intergenerational wealth is if you eat a bullet as soon as you retire. Clearly that's the better option than what you're suggesting. That way, you don't spend your entire life savings on the last decade of your life. Imagine that every since cent you've ever saved in your entire life, every opportunity you didn't take, will come to spending your time doing this.
Oh wait, I forgot.
You didn't have kids.
I see the problem: you're scared of dying alone.
Just remember that when Abdul Khalik is ignoring your coughing fit, while he Facetime's with his baby mama, that you chose him instead of a son who loves you. You might think that you won't die alone in a nursing home when people are paid to take care of you; but that's because you think "being alone" is about the number of people in a room, and not the number of people who care. Just remember that as you choke on your blood while Abdul has his earphones in, you will be dying alone, because you wanted it to be this way. You didn't want to be responsible for taking care of others, and no one will be responsible for taking care of you.
One; if a job is in extreme demand, price of said job will rise to fill the needed quota of workers.
Two; I'm reminded of various photos/videos showing old people's last moments surrounded by screeching sheeboons.
Who do you want taking care of you; A highly skilled professional that's worked their ass off to get a very high-paying job and all that implies, or some third-world rando who's background is sketchy as fuck?
For that matter, do you actually want to relate to your caretaker at all? How do you think that's going to work when they can barely speak english and don't give a flying fuck about your society at all, given that they've self-sequestered into their own little ethnic enclaves?
If they want to live in a foreign country, they can fucking move to a foreign country. Please.
Arguments aside, I doubt sincerely that they give a flying fuck about the health and well-being of boomers. They just want those exotic brownerinos lurking about so they can gush about it online for good boy points.
If you focused on more staying healthy and working out than calling those that do Nazis, you wouldn't have as many people in a condition where they required a caregiver.
Besides the obvious 'can you vet them all to ensure there aren't predators that might abuse their positions or even harm those they are meant to care for' a lot of the things that can help the elderly or increase childbirth have been actively targeted by leftists. That and the evidence that low immigration actually increases social trust and cohesion even in a recession like economy.
People that argue for immigration don't tend to understand any of the issues because 90% of the other problems they likely complain about are caused by immigrants. There's only two main non-sinister reasons to support immigrants: 1. You are an owner of capital or directly benefit from owners of capital and understand immigrants would help to improve your quality of life. 2. You believe in total equality among all people and don't care if your quality of life decreases because of immigrants since you believe every person deserves the same amount of resources as you.
The vast majority of people are not either of these but don't understand the issue enough to realize what's going on.
"Then stop waging economic warfare against the middle and lower classes."
Mass immigration to suppress wages is one of the weapons used to destroy the stability people need to raise children. A child is a twenty year project, and undermining the working class's financial stability with lower wages and lower job security makes it harder for a rational family to think it's safe to take the plunge.
The reason birthrates are low is because people can't afford kids, because all the fucking immigrants are depressing wages and inflating housing costs.
Maybe stop aborting every child you conceive, Sharon!
There's a reason the ones in charge keep pushing this and their useful idiots parrot it because they're idiots. The obvious problem that the foreigners being imported aren't going to care about the boomers, unless it's their family. There's also a lot of them that just leech off of welfare programs like parasites and contribute nothing back. They won't give a fuck about the people they're being brought into replace, regardless of the replaced people's ages.
Speaking of replacement, this is as real as ever.
https://archive.is/https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/ageing/replacement-migration.asp
Truth
It's worth pointing out that even though this is the level of logic used for open border migration the majority of migrants coming in aren't actually seeking work they're seeking welfare.
We know this is the mentality among the elites, boomers and middle class leftists who support this however I think they're severely underestimated just how many are simply filling up the country and not producing anything like the tax income they were hoping for.
Yes purely from a mathematical perspective migration could help solve the population problem, but they have done absolutely everything but offer any incentive for these migrants they mass imported to work. The migrants themselves fucking know what they're in for as well, they tell us when they're posting videos up on social media they're here for benefits so it's not as if this is just anti-migrant ranting.
The elites don't want the native population's young families having children because then that will be more political disputes and movements for them to deal with down the line whereas with migrants they can just bribe them and stay in power among other things. Basically despite all their supposed knowledge and money even for their own private goals the elites can't do basic economics.
The elites don’t care if immigrants work. What matters is that they spend. Poor people spend most of their money, and most of that money trickles upward into the coffers of the elites. It’s actually better for the elites if immigrants get that money from the entitlements funded by the middle class. That’s one of the ways that the elites capture the wealth of the middle class.
foreigners get old too
He is right, in many countries we need immigrants, but this an artificially created problem. The destruction of family values has led to this situation, it is not normal that instead of being taken care of by your family it is a stranger who takes care of old folk, in addition, those immigrants send their money back to their country and undercut local wages, they reduce the number of people earning a living wage, which in turn makes kids less affordable for locals which in turn means we need immigrants. It all comes out of the greed of corporations refusing to pay a living wage to locals, importing immigrants that are ok getting paid half because they can multiply the value of their misery wages sending it back to their country something locals can´t do.
But back to the original problem, I would tell Person A that although that solves his problem in the short term, in the long term new generations will be screwed and that statistics already show how the rich are richer and the poor are poorer, and I would remember him how in prosperous economies like Japan or South Korea they have no need for immigrants, so how is it that some countries have need for mass migration and others don´t? Because the system is broken in one of the countries.