| ▲ | myrmidon 4 days ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
One thing that really pisses me off about the whole populist anti-immigration stance is how thankless, hypocritical and selfish the whole thing is: People want to avoid negative effects from immigration (cultural/language/crimerate)- fine. But are those people acknowledging how much economical growth was driven by migrant labor over the last half century? Hell no. Would the average alt-righter be willing to sacrifice any fraction of all those compounded gains? Absolutely not- every dollar of tax is too much, even to pay a fraction of the damage that is and will be caused by them (=> energy price/co2 taxation). As a self-identifying moderate patriot, selfish complainers of that ilk seem a worse plague on their nation than the immigrants they keep whining about. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | happytoexplain 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This is an oversimplification and a pretty extreme case of over-categorizing people into groups. People who have problems with immigration aren't automatically alt-right. People who have problems with immigration understand that immigration has also historically provided economic growth - those aren't mutually exclusive things. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | yahoozoo 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Overall “economic growth” of a country is not nearly as important to most people as is their own _personal_ economic growth, opportunity, and stability. Culture, language, and crime rates also typically take priority over the nation’s macro economic growth. Most people don’t care because they are beginning to think a lot of this isn’t worth being the #1 economy in the world, plus nobody has ever explained _why_ it’s a bad thing if the USA isn’t the world’s premier economy. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | snovymgodym 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
"economic growth" and "GDP" are numbers on a spreadsheet which are only important to economists who serve the elite. Meanwhile for the last half century the average American has seen declining wealth and wage growth when adjust for inflation, while elite wealth has grown immensely during the same time period. So who is benefitting from "economic growth"? [1] This is due to many factors, but I'm wholly unconvinced by the neoliberal notion that high immigration doesn't undercut domestic wages. [1] https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||