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 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.