> A humanitarian could only say "These people are beneficial!" than he would immediately realize, "And Guatemala needs them more than us. Send them back." That has never happened.
An open border would result in a rapid and massive wave of immigrants, who would completely destroy the culture, politics, and economy of the home country.
An immigration tax could prevent that, but then it's not an open border. If the fee is high enough, poor immigrants and refugees would be left out. Otherwise it sounds like a much simpler and fair system than the current bureaucratic mess.
And https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8801578 had the proper response: "Faulty logic. One of the biggest reasons for supporting liberalized immigration is that it lets people move to the areas where they are most productive. People in Guatemala become massively more productive when they move to the USA, which earns them higher wages and makes them better off (along with others who benefit from more production)."
Thanks for the pointer to the previous discussion.
The point of the comment was saying that those immigrants don't benefit the country taking them. If having them is such a benefit, then sending them back should benefit their home country, which it obviously doesn't.
The immigrants would of course benefit economically, no one ever disputed that. But at the expense of the native population. Good luck earning a living wage when you are competing against the whole third world's population of laborers.
That's not even covering the immigrants using social services. You can't have any social programs at all, or every sick person who needs free health care can just move to your country. Or welfare benefits or whatever. Those programs can't work if the entire world's population can show up and take them.
> The point of the comment was saying that those immigrants don't benefit the country taking them. If having them is such a benefit, then sending them back should benefit their home country [...]
That's not at all clear. Also, we should probably look at benefits to persons (or humanity in general?) instead of countries.
The point of the comment was saying that those immigrants don't benefit the country taking them. If having them is such a benefit, then sending them back should benefit their home country, which it obviously doesn't.
> The immigrants would of course benefit economically, no one ever disputed that. But at the expense of the native population. Good luck earning a living wage when you are competing against the whole third world's population of laborers.
Actually, it's not at the expense of the native population. (Studies have shown that. The open borders people have the links.) In any case any negative impact could be compensated with taxes and redistribution.
Also, with free trade you already compete with the whole world in some sense.
> That's not even covering the immigrants using social services. You can't have any social programs at all, or every sick person who needs free health care can just move to your country. Or welfare benefits or whatever. Those programs can't work if the entire world's population can show up and take them.
Especially `Dont’ Restrict Immigration, Tax It' (http://openborders.info/driti/) is an interesting policy tool.