In addition to the hypocrisy, being anti-immigration is an example of thinking about the economy as a fixed pie where immigrants are stealing a slice from citizens.
In reality, you can grow the size of the pie for everyone via entrepreneurship. The American economy and American people would be worse off if the father of Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin or Satya Nadella were not able to emigrate to the US.
It’s not like founding Google or Apple is a job that an immigrant steals from a citizen.
@carnage4life I'm an immigrant myself (twice over, even) & (therefore unsurprisingly) a big fan of immigration. But I have spoken with a good friend who explained to me the argument against, specifically, unskilled immigration to welfare states. I'm going to "steelman" it here.
Consider the example of a family with 3 kids whose parents lack any skills & don't even speak English. If they move to the US then at best one of the ends up working for minimum wage. Is this really a net gain?
@adsouza There are labor shortages across the US because of this type of thinking especially after the drop in workers due to COVID.
I’m on vacation right now and over the past few days I’ve seen bus routes that no longer run on Sunday due to lack of drivers and at dinner last night they only had beer & wine because they were short staffed on bar staff.
So yes, even immigrants getting minimum wage jobs is a net gain. The US is missing 1.7 million workers since COVID.
https://www.uschamber.com/workforce/understanding-americas-labor-shortage
Dare Obasanjo
Tony