I wonder what the emigrating demographics look like. I have looked more into emigration lately as my demographic is 'replaced' and productive workers are increasingly used as fodder for parasitic attacks in favor of the ever growing benefits towards the non-productive class. The USA is increasingly becoming a place where it is best to be either be either a rich capital holder or to own nothing and get ~everything provided as long as you pop out enough kids or meet the right benefits criteria.
If you're in the middle getting squeezed you can earn more in places like Singapore or Dubai and at lower taxation rates, and the immigration scheme might be fairly simple. If you're going to live under the whims of an insane ruler you might as well get the upsides of such monarchy like you do in places like Dubai. 'Free' speech and easy access to guns are basically the only remaining gambit USA has to offer me that ~nowhere else does.
Well, depending on the state, you can come into illegally America and work for below-minimum wage under the table, have several children (legal citizens through birthright citizenship) and then attain benefits on behalf of those children who, on paper, live in a household with little or no income.
None of this is made up. I grew up with several friends that had this arrangement and later in life attained citizenship, usually through military service, and told me the reality of their upbringing. It’s a complex environment.
Approximately 40-45% of _all_ US residents, natural-born or immigrant, receive more public benefits than they pay in taxes. Consider if an immigrant making a below-average wage could actually fit into both categories.
I'm not against immigration, just pointing out the flaw in your argument.
Right!? I can't believe it's current year and this bigot doesn't want his country overrun with foreigners or to have a middle class lifestyle unattainable for the average man. Discusting!
Lol I am for completely open borders, which probably puts me in the most extreme 1% of pro-immigration policy.
This doesn't make me blind. The benefits liability is massive, mostly to my own citizens, whom are even harder to escape than immigrants except by emigration. My country is being run by a proto-fascist, and the only remaining benefit I get of that is that he kind of reflects my demographic, although that is rapidly being 'replaced.' So in 30 years, going down the road it is now, it could be someone just as authoritarian but sees me as the enemy instead of brown people.
I am not particularly excited to wait around for that, while paying out massive benefits to the non-productive, plus the national debt, plus the taxation rates that exceed other monarchy-like countries with even freer economic systems.
If I was anti-immigrant I wouldn't even consider immigration. I only consider it because I don't have a dogmatic allegiance to the constitution nor 'America' as a political entity; if living under a dystopic theocracy provides more liberty it shouldn't be excluded from consideration.
The main reason why I haven't left, is I'm trying real hard to not be a coward and just leave rather than try to fix things, unlike many cowardly immigrants that have arrived at the USA because they can't be bothered to fix their own country.
Your world view is so shattered that someone espousing a few of the views of some right-wing people doesn't match what you think, that you refuse to believe it. Instead you suggest your own vicious introduced stereotype, that if someone is a "parasite" or "non productive" that it must refer to an immigrant -- that says as much guilt about you as you think it does about me.
Is really interesting how language breaks sometimes.
I guess I am from a really different context than you, while reading those words (parasite, non-productive) I had to choose an interpretation and depending on that I might be really close to what you say or really against it.
On this case I think some of the replies took a different option and that is why the answered like that.
Nah, I called him out for the dog whistles because that’s exactly what he’s doing.
He’s being vague enough that he can trot out some defense of “I didn’t say the exact word ‘immigrant’” even though the context of the conversation is about immigrants and he’s using right wing talking points about immigration. He even included the “actually you’re the one with bad thoughts cause you recognize my dog whistle” reversal.
It’s an amazing strategy because somehow, despite a decade of this kind of communication strategy, there’s still the clueless or the hopeful who want to assume good faith and then will defend these people against anyone calling them out.
The United States of America was created by British settlers who displaced the American Indians and created a new nation built on English language, law, and culture, and out of ideas that had been floating around during the English Civil War. In the 20th century we came up with these feel-good narratives about immigrants to help assimilate the massive number of immigrants that we had taken in during the late 19th and early 20th century. But we did that at the same time as we severely restricted immigration under the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act.
And even though British Americans long ago became a minority--the single largest ethnic group is Germans--there is shockingly little influence from any other group in America's core political, legal, and civic institutions. Our constitution and laws have more ideas from ancient Rome and Greece than from all contemporary foreign cultures combined. The Ivy League schools that still dominate our bureaucratic and professional class were founded by British Americans as copies of Oxford/Cambridge. Silicon Valley arose around Stanford University (Stanford being an English surname) and a U.S. military that at the time was still dominated by British Americans. Wall Street is a direct descendant of London's financial sector, though it has some influence from New York's history as a Dutch city.
That's the reason the United States is economically, politically, and culturally more similar to Australia than to Mexico, despite being on the opposite side of the planet from Australia and diverging politically 250 years ago. To the extent the U.S. is an "immigrant nation," that is only in the sense that many immigrants and their descendants happen to live here. But those immigrants are governed and organized by the (now nearly dead) hand of the Anglo-Protestants, through their law, norms, principles, and institutions.
It's so baffling to see you on this site consistently implying that Italians, Germans, or $WHOEVER are somehow worse Americans. Because if that were true, then you'd also have to acknowledge that you and I are worse Americans, which I don't think you believe.
And in general, your obsession with of the British is strange to me, because as you note, most Americans are not British and it's been that way for most of American history. Of course, there have been many great British Americans. But if we're weirdly keeping score, it's seems obvious that there would be a larger number of great Americans who weren't British?
For immigration policy, the issue is the aggregate cultural, political, and social impact of large groups of immigrants. It has nothing to do with individuals.
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, reflects the impact of mass German immigration. Little Bangladesh in Queens reflects the impact of mass immigration from my country, Bangladesh. Would I rather live in a country where the government, institutions, etc., were like Little Bangladesh, or like Cedar Rapids? That’s not even a serious question. My fear about immigration is that, over time, the country will become more like Little Bangladesh and less like Cedar Rapids.
Most Americans aren’t British, but most Americans do carry on British culture and norms to varying degrees. If American soil really was magic, and you could take 100,000 Bangladeshis and they’d become cultural New England Puritans instantly, I’d be in favor of open borders.
The military is German, not British. Eisenhower, Nimitz, Oppenheimer. Operation Paperclip. The maneuver tactics you see in Band of Brothers were copied from the Prussians — that is going back to the 1870s. Patton’s speech to the Third Army is the least British speech imaginable; if Rudyard Kipling heard it then he would have exploded. USMC has a web page basically apologizing for being so German: https://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/why-the-german-example/
> I can't believe it's current year and this bigot doesn't want his country overrun with foreigners or to have a middle class lifestyle unattainable for the average man
Tsk tsk, peasants learned to live with their stature centuries ago why can’t you?
I would agree that social security recipients tend to be the biggest welfare queens. They paid a bunch of people that are now dead. And think because they "paid into" one group of dead people, that now living other people now owe them. An exercise in the logic of the insane, but yet the veneer that holds up the fiction.
It's a broke and bankrupt system, a wise person might jump the ship well before that happens.
I believe he's referring to the fact that social security, despite being billed as essentially a "retirement account" type program where e.g. silent gen paid in and got out roughly the same amount, it functions more like a ponzi scheme.
This is a consequence of the fact that, when the program was instituted, Roosevelt wanted to immediately start paying out to some people. So, boomers (very large generation) paid for their parents (relatively much smaller generation, meaning small per-person bill).
Now millennials and zoomers (relatively smaller generations) are expected to pay for boomers (much larger per-person bill). Between that, the incredible spending of medicare, and the federal propping-up of the housing market, a huge proportion of the economy has been dedicated to wealth transfer to the olds, an unproductive class who will be gone soon anyhow.
... thhat is not what I'm saying. Im describing the system by which social security bizarrely says a different person owes you because you paid someone else, most of which will be dead by the time you 'draw' it 'back'.
The dead person paid other dead people that died before them, why would that establish a debt from me to them? If the dead person got their SS back from the even deader people before them that they previously paid, I'd agree they were merely paid back what they paid into them.
People are legally required to pay into the fund to pay for
a legally guaranteed benefit. The mechanics of the program are immaterial. If the program doesn’t pay for the benefit they were promised, after taking their money, that’s theft.
You could argue that you shouldn’t have to pay for social security. But hopefully you aren’t arguing that you shouldn’t have to pay and prior payers should get screwed. Any exit to social security should ensure that the previous bargain is upheld, somehow, given the forced participation and the number of people who have planned their retirement around it.
If you're in the middle getting squeezed you can earn more in places like Singapore or Dubai and at lower taxation rates, and the immigration scheme might be fairly simple. If you're going to live under the whims of an insane ruler you might as well get the upsides of such monarchy like you do in places like Dubai. 'Free' speech and easy access to guns are basically the only remaining gambit USA has to offer me that ~nowhere else does.