Why the US desperately needs open borders to avoid economic disaster

Reposted from Quora:

I would argue the USA desperately needs open borders to avoid economic disaster.

Consider that:

1: There are 11 million ordinary, hard-working people willing to risk their lives and prison time to create a better life for their families.

2: There are 11 million American business owners who need hard-working non-professional workers desperately enough to break the law

3: US immigration law makes it nearly impossible for honest, hardworking non-professionals to become Americans legally.

Why are American businesses so desperate for workers that they are willing to break the law? There is a record number of unfilled positions in small businesses. America’s population is aging, and this will cause severe economic problems due to the unsustainable nature of our welfare programs.

The chief problem is the USA has been surviving on IOUs for decades, funding wars and welfare programs with debt. Trump’s budget means the welfare-warfare state is more unsustainable than ever, and within a decade, baby boomers will bankrupt social security and other programs.

The USA must have young, hard-working immigrants to avoid economic collapse. Illegal immigrants are even better since they pay into social security and Medicare/Medicaid taxes, but are ineligible to collect benefits.

The free movement of labor across borders is the single most beneficial variable in the US economy:

“According to the paper Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk? (2011) by Michael Clemens at the Center for Global Development, open borders could lead to a one-time boost in world GDP by about 50-150%.

Want a global economic boom? Open the borders

” typical workers in developing countries would see annual wages more than double, from an average of $8,903 today to $19,272 with open borders. That is, the typical worker in the third world would end up making about double the individual poverty line in the United States today. “

A world of free movement would be $78 trillion richer

10 thoughts on “Why the US desperately needs open borders to avoid economic disaster”

  1. This is complete Marxist cancer. You’re advocating FOR an economic collapse. You can have open borders or a welfare state. You can’t have both.

    1. DS, I agree. How do people who are enslaved by fiat currency, debt, and taxation at gunpoint argue for more to join the system? And to join the side of system holding the gun!
      Living in Mexico one suffers far less government interference and intrusion in their life, but equally so, one receives far less government assistance produced from stolen wealth.
      If the US economy is about to collapse from lack of open border, why are all these Economic geniuses remaining in a sinking ship?

  2. Desperately? One is desperate when there is no alternative. I agree there is an imbalance in Labor supply and demand, however this is always the case to varying degrees. Outside of economic textbooks, in the real world, where you never have ceteras perabus, equilibriums are always shifting. These shifts are the result of market participants responding to imbalances in supply and demand. This article is claiming the market will avoid collapse if and only if the US has open borders, however it offers no evidence that there is no alternative to respond to the imbalance.

  3. Bill Krystal, a political analyst, who states that American workers don’t want to work because they are “decadent, lazy, spoiled, whatever”. It’s not the workers who are decadent, lazy and spoiled, but rather the rich business owners who steal from the workers (e.g., increasing income equality due to addictive economic engagements) in unethical systems where one can leech off of the poor who are taken advantage of who are the decadent, lazy, and spoiled as they are addicted to profit and power and will promote (economic) systems that make them more and more money. More and more money can only made if you give the slaves/employees less and less, but that only creates the scenario where they become consciously aware that it is unethical and unfair, thus making it emotionally torturous to keep participating in the unethical scam that is Capitalism. The only people who would want to work are people who in relative difference to ratio of slavery/freedom and the way of life are people in other countries who have it worse than America and so they perceive American slave labor jobs as a desirable situation because of the perspective of an immigrant, America’s Capitalism is better than their nation, but this only creates the scenario of them waking up to the fact that the system of Capitalism is slavery in fewer generations due to the increasing income gap between the slave owners and the slaves. So what Bill Krystal is talking about here is that Capitalism is an unsustainable system that is designed to collapse and that due to its satanic, out-of-at-onement with life nature, to attempt to maintain the system you have to routinely replace the slaves with more willing slaves. And what happens to the exiting slaves? Typically, genocide. We’re throwing them to the streets torturing them while giving tax dollars to illegal immigrants. Why? Because they’ll work for less and make the rich more and more. The problem here is slavery. It never ended. America needs to end immigration, period, reinvent itself and let only those in temporarily to gain skills to bring it back to their country of origin to make the world a better place. Immigration is no solution at all.

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  5. Why am I obsessed with immigration?

    There are just two political issues I care about: free trade and immigration.

    Why?

    Because I need $X million to achieve financial independence within Y years. After that, I’ll retire to a tropical paradise in Z and you can all go to hell.

    To reach my goal, I need the U.S. economy not to collapse for a few more decades. It doesn’t need to do great, but I need positive growth to meet my investment targets.

    Problem is, the USA has been surviving on IOUs for decades, funding wars and welfare programs with debt. Trump’s budget means the welfare-warfare state is more unsustainable than ever, and within a decade, baby boomers will bankrupt social security and other programs.

    The USA must have young, hard-working immigrants to avoid economic collapse. Illegal immigrants are even better since they pay into social security and Medicare/Medicaid taxes, but are ineligible to collect benefits.

    Furthermore, trade is the single most important economic variable in the US economy. (Rule of law is more fundamental, but it is less likely to collapse here.) The collapse of international trade caused both the Great Depression and WWII.

    This is not to say that I don’t care about the plight of immigrants. I support immigrants BECAUSE the free movement of labor and goods across borders is essential to civilization and a basic human right. There’s no contradiction between the moral and the practical.

  6. As citizens, we have a few civic responsibilities to our country. We don’t owe them because we were born or grew up here. Rather, our duty comes from a selfish desire for a better life for ourselves and those we care for.

    Among these, is the duty to assist in emergencies, to testify against criminals, to serve on a jury when asked, and most importantly, to speak on behalf of principles which make our civilization possible and denounce those who erode it.

    It’s for this last reason that everyone who values American values, civilization, and just law ought to denounce the vicious campaign against immigrants.

  7. My complete thoughts on immigration:

    1: Nations don’t have rights. Only people have rights.
    2: People have a right to exclude others from their property for any reason. They have no right to exclude people from other’s property or to prevent their association.
    3: In the case of infrastructure, public or private, the proper policy is to allow all peaceful people to access it freely.
    4: Therefore, all States ought to have a policy of Open Immigration: no restriction of the free movement of labor. Passports and citizenship should be eliminated from our laws and vocabulary. The free movement of peaceful people across borders is a fundamental human right.
    5: Therefore, restrictions on immigration violate the rights of both immigrants and those who would allow them on their property, whether it is employers, friends, spouses, or neighbors.
    6: Residency in a State does not confer a moral right to another’s property or the right to make decisions about other people’s property (i.e. the right to vote). This applies whether one was born in a State or moved there.
    7: Two wrongs do not make a right: the fact that we allow residents of a country to vote or collect stolen goods (welfare) does not justify using violence to restrict the free movement of peaceful labor.
    8: A society must apply certain fundamental ethical and legal principles in its laws. The right to decide which principles determine its laws (i.e. participate in the political process) should be restricted to those who have proven themselves trustworthy and of sound judgment, and have the incentives to uphold their nation’s principles — regardless of how they came to live in that society.
    9: The right to participate in the political process should be based on objective legal criteria, such as age, property ownership, net worth, or material contribution to certain public services.

  8. If you asked, I think most people would say that they would not have willingly gone along with the Holocaust or American slavery, or Jim Crow laws. Maybe you’ve marched in a gay pride parade and you think you’ve proven your commitment to justice.

    But I think few people stood up for African Americans or Jews or gays until they asserted their human rights through decades of bitter struggle. Americans only changed their mind on issues like gay marriage once the ideological battle had already been won. Racists, homophobes, etc have already been defeated in the West, and your “struggle” against them is just recognizing and extending the status quo.

    But there is one issue in which the fundamental human rights of a group are largely not being recognized: people who happened to have been born in a different country. For the fact is, that the peaceful migration of people is a fundamental human right. All immigration restrictions on the peaceful movement of labor across borders violate the rights of both immigrants and the natives with whom they are forbidden to associate.

    If you are not part of the struggle for the rights of immigrants, you have zero credibility to claim that you would have stood up to Nazis, slavers, racists, or homophobes.

  9. You say I’m “not a patriot” because I’m for open immigration and immigrants “threaten our values.”
    Your immigration plan calls for a quota of .001% of the population per year because you’re “pro-American values” and you’re terrified of people who think or look differently than you.
    If a few immigrant neighbors are enough to erode your country’s values, your values are shit.
    Your real problem is that you think that wealth comes from keeping the big pile of gold you found when you were born all to yourself.
    The truth is that wealth is not a pile of crap but human talent and sweat in action, and most Americans are too entitled, lazy, and uneducated to keep your welfare checks coming by themselves.
    Without hard-working immigrants and free trade, Americas IOU’s would have bounced and your checks would have dried up decades ago and you would be just another bum in another loser country.

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