Tag Archives: open borders

This is a really important fact that people don’t talk about enough: McK & IMF: #immigrants (living not where born) account for 3.4% of world pop but produce 9.4% of world output/$6.7tn https://t.co/tcFELcPYid — Linda Yueh (@lindayueh) December 1, 2016 That is a huge gap. Immigrants’ economic output is almost three times their weight as a proportion of the population, a difference that adds up to $3 trillion annually. Why would this be the case? Well, immigrants are typically pretty...

Explained in a meme:

It can be illustrated first by a quotation from Ha-Joon Chang’s 23 Things they Don’t Tell you about Capitalism:“Wages in rich countries are determined more by immigration control than anything else, including any minimum wage legislation. How is the immigration maximum determined? Not by the ‘free’ labour market, which, if left alone, will end up replacing 80–90 per cent of native workers with cheaper, and often more productive, immigrants. Immigration is largely settled by politics.”...

In the video below, Andrew Marr asks Corbyn whether open borders has become extremely unpopular with Labour’s working class voters, which is a plain truth (here, here, here, and here). His answer?[embedded content]Corbyn’s response: no, it’s all a conspiracy by the right-wing newspapers and (apparently) there are no significant downsides to mass immigration of any kind (such as, for example, overpopulation, soaring housing and rent costs, holding down of real wages, competition for scarce...

But why should people on the left?From Rothbard’s Power and Market: Government and the Economy: “Laborers may also ask for geographical grants of oligopoly in the form of immigration restrictions. In the free market the inexorable trend is to equalize wage rates for the same value-productive work all over the earth. This trend is dependent on two modes of adjustment: businesses flocking from high-wage to low-wage areas, and workers flowing from low-wage to high-wage areas. Immigration...

An International Monetary Fund study is gushing over the benefits of 1.1 million new migrants in Germany.Why, you ask?Once you put aside the minor point about a temporary boost to GDP, we get to the real issue: according to the pro-business IMF, Germany can get migrants into jobs in the coming years by ramping up “labor-market flexibility” – which is nothing but neoliberal code for smashing up what’s left of German labour market regulations and trade unions, since unhinged neoliberal...

In the video below, which struck me as very interesting, especially his remarks on his brother Christopher Hitchens.[embedded content]The amusing meme that the American neoconservatives who planned the Iraq war (which Christopher Hitchens supported so vehemently) were the new liberal Trotskyists is a favourite of libertarians (see here), and there may well be an element of truth to it, given that the neoconservative foreign policy was a radical departure from the realist school of foreign...

You really can’t get someone more left-wing on the American political spectrum than Ralph Nader – that is, without going to communism or Marxism.And yet here he is below giving us a badly-needed left-wing perspective on why open borders and mass immigration are a bad idea. And he is perfectly right too. I put forward a similar case here.Yet another thing to add is this: with open borders, Keynesian fiscal policy and policies to create full employment are badly thwarted and disrupted, because...

And I hope more and more left-wing people can see this now. Look at some of the news from Europe in recent days. This in Sweden is just a recognition of reality.Unfortunately, people in Sweden and throughout the EU have failed to realise that the evidence is strong that most of the migrants coming into Europe this year are not genuine refugees, but merely economic migrants. Europe cannot take in 1 million or 1.5 million people a year for the foreseeable future when most of these people are...