sardia wrote:That's the thing about the Mariel boatlift, people pan it as all sorts of bad policy, but when you look at the numbers, you don't see anything. Look at the huge numbers of people that were rapidly moved into the Miami labor market. The paper shows(provides evidence) that it had no effect on wages or unemployment rates. It's not a straightforward relationship that for every person who moves, there's 1 less job for you. And yes, the OP is a moron, but there's other long time posters here who are giving really bad arguments.
It is, to a degree, like altering wages. If you give everyone twice as much money, well, prices will inflate to twice as much. Yeah, this has nasty effects and such on savings, but dealing in larger numbers doesn't mean much. Actual production to consumption isn't changed, so it's not really meaningful.
Likewise, increasing population size does cost more to support them. Twice as many people will cost roughly twice as much to support. That said, there are twice as many people producing(again, roughly). End result, average person's life isn't going to be very affected. At least, not in gross GDP/person senses. So, the "they took er jerbs" argument isn't really relevant on a large scale.
Now, as you drill down, talking about productive vs non productive refugees gets more complex, and pretty much every country puts a finger on the scales to try to boost the numbers in it's favor. It's easier to emigrate somewhere if you're skilled, rich, not disabled, etc. But, mostly, we're not talking about immigration as a whole being a problem, we start talking about specific problems within immigration.
sardia wrote:Wait, prove that statement. I think it's probably true, but has anyone ever had wide open borders? The last one I could think of is the US Canada border*, and that ended after 9/11. Maybe the wild west era before the civil war? Lots of free movement in those days.
*I know it's not a true open border even then because people could cross but not emigrate.
Used to be quite common. In general, closed, secured borders have arrived over the past hundred years or less. Granted, that's not exactly modern, but I think you can have pretty open borders in some circumstances, at least. The general adoption of border controls seems to mirror the rise of the powerful nation state that keeps pretty close tabs on individual civilians, be it taxes, social programs, or what have you. The more detailed the state/citizen interactions, the more it matters what people you have. Like most things, it seems to be more about money than anything else. Gotta keep tabs on who you're going to tax, got to keep tabs on what things they might be importing/exporting to dodge tax.
I don't think security is honestly a very large driver in most cases. Okay, for the Ukraine, it probably is. But most countries are not in that situation.