Let’s say it was not a crime to walk across the border, overstay a visa, etc. What is the argument against “illegal” immigration?
What did Jesus say about immigrants?
So if it were just fine for the poorest billion people in the world to come to the US overnight in order to better themselves, would there be a problem with that?
Lets think…crowded cities, labor wages and jobs undercut, limited resources like water…and of course everyone who wants their city and its traffic to be even more crowded than it already is would favor it.
I don’t know, that’s a hard one.
would there be?
I doubt there’d be many people settling in cities. Rent is pretty high
Record low unemployment. Which jobs would they be taking?
They could settle in the rust belt? Is water really a limited resource in America?
see the first one
I agree. That’s why I’m asking.
We allow free flow of people between the States. How has that worked out for us?
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Outside of letting people travel to and from Oklahoma, pretty well.
“I got mine”
Apparently, a lot of people forgot where their families came from.
Since that means its not illegal there’s no argument.
Where do most settle now…the big cities of course. Unlike some like to pretend, they aren’t arriving here and heading off to some spot in the desert.
Sure we can and are taking more immigrants all the time…close to a couple of million a year.
Your hypothetical was no barriers, you just come here.
Why wouldn’t the poorest come here until this country was as poor as the country they left? I can’t think of a reason.
you have so little faith in market forces that you think people would just cram in like sardines forever? People come here for work. When there aren’t any jobs, like in 2009, people don’t come here. That’s why the net flow of migration from Mexico was negative for most of the last decade.
As I said, when it would be as poor here as the country they left, they would stop coming.
and since 2009 proved the opposite, now what?
You are talking solely about the estimate that there was a net outflow of illegal immigration during 2009 viz a viz one country, Mexico.
There was still a net increase in immigration during that and every year.
And we did not have open borders, as you hypothesize in your OP, to every country in the world in 2009.
2009 did not prove your case.
yes, the country where most of our illegal immigration comes from.
Yes, because there were a lot of jobs that Americans absolutely will not take, no matter how much they like to pretend they would.
Add whatever conditions you’d like. It’s a thought experiment.
Maybe some of those jobs Americans absolutely will not take would be taken if the wages weren’t undercut.
the wages would be dictated by market forces, unless you want to put constraints on them.
Things change. There are countries poorer than Mexico.
"Meanwhile, the number of unauthorized immigrants from nations other than Mexico has grown since 2009, from 5 million that year to 5.4 million in 2015. Non-Mexicans numbered 5.7 million in the preliminary 2016 estimate, a total that was not statistically different from 2015.
From 2009 to 2015, the number of unauthorized immigrants from Asia and Central America rose. "
ok?
10immigrants
Ok, so your point about just looking at illegals from Mexico doesn’t hold that much water.
For that matter, comparing illegal immigration to what immigration would be without any restrictions is kind of lame. If you have 11 or 12 million here who were willing to come here or stay illegally and risk deportation at any time, is that really representative to what would happen with no legal restrictions? You might well be talking an increase in large multiples of that number.
you countered my point that market forces stabilize the net flow of immigration as evidenced by Mexico which is where a majority of our immigrants come from with…
a bunch of charts showing that market forces stabilized the net flow of immigration over the last decade and Mexicans are about half of all immigrants at this point.
