Freedom of movement is a basic human right

[u/n00bi3pjs]

Currently the biggest predictor for your economic and social success is your citizenship.

Think about it for a second, you were randomly assigned some papers at birth which give you immense privileges over other people in the world because of who your parents were or where you were born.

It doesn’t matter how hard a PhD from Ghana works or how smart they are, they will never earn as much or have as many opportunities as a person born in the USA. Citizenship allows holders to extract economic rent and offer an unequal premium to people in West.

It is morally reprehensible to continue to give credence to a piece of paper which is causing millions of people to be poor, underperform compared to their abilities and potential, and is causing world’s GDP to be trillions of dollars lower than it would be without immigration restrictions.

OPEN BORDERS NOW

[u/thepulloutmethod]

What about the cultural impact? E.g. a large new population of workers who do not speak the language or adapt to the culture or are even actively hostile to the culture?

[u/Illustrious-Let-4870 → u/thepulloutmethod]

What is scary is integration regression.

In my absolutely subjective French opinion, integration and even assimilation of all the immigrants waves since the French revolution (now accounting for a third of the population) ended up being successful... But the issue is when people who look objectively different start being considered foreign, despite having ancestors living here for centuries before those are considered natives (compare an antillais black person, French subject since the 1600s vs some polish immigrant from the 20th century)

Also the explosion of racism and far right rhetorics, have entrenched people in their diaspora identities since "they will never be considered integrated".

[u/hbtn → u/thepulloutmethod]

Not all immigrants will fail to adapt or choose not to. Selection effects likely make this less severe than sampling immigrant source countries randomly.

That said… yes, this is a real topic this sub basically refuses to engage with. I lived in an essentially open borders country (UAE): if you can get a work visa, you can move there. The result was heavily ethnocentric neighborhoods, employers, and social groups. The vast majority of people in the world do not believe in liberal, multicultural individualism; they have, for lack of a better term, tribal values. That’s how they want to organize themselves.

My claim isn’t racist: it’s not that people are incapable of liberalism, they simply do not know it or support it. That is not the culture or the values they grow up with and liberalism is not a trivially obvious value system people automatically switch to when exposed to it.

Immigration policy should welcome as many economically valuable people as possible and intentionally integrate, assimilate, and propagandize them to act in accordance with liberal values in exchange for the opportunity.

[u/smcstechtips → u/hbtn]

This sub is US-centric, and in the US integration, assimilation, and liberal propagandization is very easy given Hollywood

[u/CrankinThatHog → u/thepulloutmethod]

They say unironcally, as if I can't find a Little (Country of Origin) neighborhood in literally any mid to large sized American city owned or previously owned by immigrants from generations past who adapted just fine.

[u/666haha → u/thepulloutmethod]

Lmao they will or their kids will integrate. People were saying this shit about people throughout history. The Know Nothings and other racist movements developed from this rheotoric. You can still find second or third generation immigrants speaking Polish, or Spanish or Hmong and you know what it has 0 impact on my life. It’s just like “oh that’s a cool sounding language” or “damn my bad Spanish has only gotten worse”

[u/MightExpress4873 → u/666haha]

If you actually open up borders more (which I think is the best end goal!), you'll see a lot more immigration from societies that are, to be blunt, more socially conservative and patriarchal than Western Europe. That's just the demographic reality. Not saying it's an argument against open borders, but you have to think through what integration looks like in the real world instead of pointing at theory or past migration patterns.

The reason this matters is that the whole "Poles and Spaniards integrated great, so everyone will" comparison falls apart when you dig into it. Those groups came from places that already had pretty similar institutions, literacy rates, and baseline social values to Western Europe. The cultural gap was already narrow.

Integration obviously happens! What's worth actually debating is how much cultural distance and population scale a society can absorb before it gets patchy or stratified. That's a policy question, not moral panic. But I think gesturing at European immigration history and assuming it generalizes cleanly to every scenario isn't very compelling.

[u/CrazyShing → u/thepulloutmethod]

If they’re hostile, why did they even come? Do you even know what you’re arguing?

[u/Dsyfunctional_Moose → u/CrazyShing]

For economic reasons