Not to get all libertardarian on this excellent post, but the various environmental rules on home construction, and on adding utilities to new home developments, insanely drives the prices up. The insanity of the open borders policies are matched by various layers of policy insanity elsewhere, combining to give us our dystopian outcomes.
Open borders serves their direct interests. And the environmental and policy goals seem to serve their emotional and neurotic wants.
If the now 60,000,000+ illegal alien migrant criminals are deported en masse and refused any future entry into the United States, the beneficial knock-on effects will be tremendous for this country.
Employers will be forced to pay something approximating a living wage. Housing prices will inevitably fall and young employed people will be able to purchase their first home. This will encourage family formation and the creation of 1, 2 and 3 children families. Without this, the United States will experience population collapse. These are the fruits of the Deathvax™️.
Any attempt to replace Americans with hordes of uneducated, unskilled illegals with nothing but contempt for our country, our language and our culture is tantamount to the destruction of the United States.
Those who advocate and facilitate this population replacement are TRAITORS…and must be punished under Rule of Law as such.
The correct pro-family government policies enacted strictly which encourage family formation and favor the well-being of children can yet save the United States from Marxist annihilation.
Nothing need be coerced or mandated. Create the conditions that promote the nuclear family and American families will thrive and multiply. That’s the human condition.
The first step is to rid ourselves of tens of millions of parasites whose unwelcome, unlawful presence in our country is destroying our economy and strangling OUR AMERICAN CHILDREN’S future.
You lay out a plan that makes way too much sense for any of the retards running this country to ever do. The necessary prerequisite to any is this is to replace our regime the way they’re trying to replace their citizenry. Only then will anything positive get done.
A very effective method: When a company is fined for hiring an illegal, pay part of the fine to the person who reported it. If the illegal reports himself, he gets to take $100,000 and go home.
A history lesson on why you never, ever, accept large numbers of immigrants or refugees. (I learned this at a seminar at the United States War College back in the late 1980’s. As always stayed with me. I guarantee it’s not being taught now).
About the year a.d. 372 the Huns, an enormous Tartar horde from beyond the Don and Volga, burst into the lands north of the Euxine, and began to work their way westward. The first tribe that lay in their way, the nomadic race of the Alans, they almost exterminated. Then they fell upon the Goths. The Ostrogoths made a desperate attempt to defend the line of the Dniester against the oncoming savages—“men with faces that can hardly be called faces—rather shapeless black collops of flesh with little points instead of eyes; little in stature, but lithe and active, skilful in riding, broad shouldered, good at the bow, stiff-necked and proud, hiding under a barely human form the ferocity of the wild beast.” But the enemy whom the Gothic historian describes in these uninviting terms was too strong for the Teutons of the East. The Ostrogoths were crushed and compelled to become vassals of the Huns, save a remnant who fought their way southward to the Wallachian shore, near the marshes of the Delta of the Danube.
Then the Huns fell on the Visigoths. The wave of invasion pressed on; the Bug and the Pruth proved no barrier to the swarms of nomad bowmen, and the Visigoths, under their Duke Fritigern, fell back in dismay with their wives and children, their waggons and flocks and herds, till they found themselves with their backs to the Danube. Surrender to the enemy was more dreadful to the Visigoths than to their eastern brethren; they were more civilized, most of them were Christians, and the prospect of slavery to savages seems to have appeared intolerable to them.
Pressed against the Danube and the Roman border, the Visigoths sent in despair to ask permission to cross from the Emperor. A contemporary writer describes how they stood. “All the multitude that had escaped from the murderous savagery of the Huns—no less than 200,000 fighting men, besides women and old men and children—-were there on the river bank, stretching out their hands with loud lamentations, and earnestly supplicating leave to cross, bewailing their calamity, and promising that they would ever faithfully adhere to the imperial alliance if only the boon was granted them.”
The proposal of the Goths filled Valens with dismay. It was difficult to say which was more dangerous—to refuse a passage to 200,000 desperate men with arms in their hands and a savage foe at their backs, or to admit them within the line of river and fortress that protected the border, with an implied obligation to find land for them. After much doubting he chose the latter alternative: if the Goths would give hostages and surrender their arms, they should be ferried across the Danube and permitted to settle as subject-allies within the empire.
The Goths accepted the terms, gave up the sons of their chiefs as hostages, and streamed across the river as fast as the Roman Danube-flotilla could transport them. But no sooner had they reached Moesia than troubles broke out. The Roman officials at first tried to disarm the immigrants, but the Goths were unwilling to surrender their weapons, and offered large bribes to be allowed to retain them: in strict disobedience to the Emperor’s orders, the bribes were accepted and the Goths retained their arms. Further disputes soon broke out…. Fritigern, with many of his nobles, was dining with Count Lupicinus at the town of Marcianopolis, when some starving Goths tried to pillage the market by force. A party of Roman soldiers strove to drive them off, and were at once mishandled or slain. On hearing the tumult and learning its cause, Lupicinus recklessly bade his retinue seize and slay Fritigern and the other guests at his banquet. The Goths drew their swords and cut their way out of the palace. Then riding to the nearest camp of his followers, Fritigern told his tale, and bade them take up arms against Rome.
There followed a year of desperate fighting all along the Danube, and the northern slope of the Balkans. The Goths half-starved for many months, and smarting under the extortion and chicanery to which they had been subjected, soon showed that the old barbarian spirit was but thinly covered by the veneer of Christianity and civilization which they had acquired in the last half-century. The struggle resolved itself into a repetition of the great raids of the third century: towns were sacked and the open country harried in the old style, nor was the war rendered less fierce by the fact that many runaway slaves and other outcasts among the provincial population joined the invaders.
In 378 a.d., the main body of the Goths succeeded in forcing the line of the Balkans; they were not far from Adrianople when the Emperor started to attack them, with a splendid army of 60,000 men. Every one expected to hear of a victory, for the reputation of invincibility still clung to the legions, and after six hundred years of war the disciplined infantry of Rome, robur peditum, whose day had lasted since the Punic wars, were still reckoned superior, when fairly handled, to any amount of wild barbarians….
Valens found the main body of the Goths encamped in a great “laager,” on the plain north of Adrianople. After some abortive negotiations he developed an attack on their front, when suddenly a great body of horsemen charged in on the Roman flank. It was the main strength of the Gothic cavalry, which had been foraging at a distance; receiving news of the fight it had ridden straight for the battle field. Some Roman squadrons which covered the left flank of the Emperor’s army were ridden down and trampled under foot. Then the Goths swept down on the infantry of the left wing, rolled it up, and drove it in upon the centre. So tremendous was their impact that legions and cohorts were pushed together in hopeless confusion. Every attempt to stand firm failed, and in a few minutes left, centre, and reserve, were one undistinguishable mass. Imperial guards, light troops, lancers, auxiliaries, and infantry of the line were wedged together in a press that grew closer every moment.
The Roman cavalry saw that the day was lost, and rode off without another effort. Then the abandoned infantry realized the horror of their position: equally unable to deploy or to fly, they had to stand to be cut down. Men could not raise their arms to strike a blow, so closely were they packed; spears snapped right and left, their bearers being unable to lift them to a vertical position; many soldiers were stifled in the press. Into this quivering mass the Goths rode, plying lance and sword against the helpless enemy. It was not till forty thousand men had fallen that the thinning of the ranks enabled the survivors to break out and follow their cavalry in a headlong flight. They left behind them, dead on the field, the Emperor, the Grand Masters of the Infantry and Cavalry, the Count of the Palace, and thirty-five commanders of different corps.
The battle of Adrianople was the most fearful defeat suffered by a Roman army since Cannæ, a slaughter to which it is aptly compared by the contemporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus. The army of the East was almost annihilated, and was never reorganized again on the old Roman lines.
Only six years after permitting hundreds of thousands of poor desperate refugees to cross the river and reach the safety of Roman lands, the Emperor Valens and fifty thousand of his best soldiers were dead at their hands. Seventeen years later, Alaric the Goth ruled over the north, and “wandered far and wide, from the Danube to the gates of Constantinople, and from Constantinople to Greece, ransoming or sacking every town in his way till the Goths were gorged with plunder.”
38 years after the Goths crossed the Danube, Alaric the Goth sacked Rome itself. One has to observe that it may not take 38 years this time.
Never, ever, accept immigrants or refugees. Thus endth the lesson.
Konstantin Kisin recently made a good argument in his opening statement in a debate which he then added to his Triggernometry Podcast- 3% of people in the UK though that immigration was a major issue in 1995. By 2015 that number was 56%. That's not a shift to the Far Right as many in the media would maintain- it's the fact that ordinary people live closer to reality than elites. As anyone who has ever visited Expat communities around the world will tell you, the market dominant migrants at the top of the socioeconomic spectrum with which most elites in the West are familiar, are highly atypical- they tend to self-sort on the basis of income and interest rather than ghettoise on the basis of shared culture, they integrate seamlessly to Western cultures and values and even take up social hobbies like baking or choir singing.
Nobody gives a shit about sane levels of legal migration. The toxicity of the debate centres around the insane Open Society edicts imposed from on high which necessarily entail mass migration in unprecedented numbers. Thanks for mentioning the difficulties of housing production. Home building is one of those areas where the efficient-market hypothesis simply doesn't hold. Increased demand doesn't always equal increased supply. Even if one presumes a massive Federal Libertarian shift towards property holders being legally empowered to build new houses on their land, reducing scarcity costs to harness the forgotten power of the nation that built Liberty ships for the world to create a generation of starter homes for young Americans desperate for the lost promise of the American Dream, it wouldn't necessarily mean that the capacity exists to reverse the rise of corporate rentier economics, it might not be enough.
Global building material supply chains are stretched to the limit. It's a good sector to keep a keen eye on for the purposes of investment. Most building suppliers won't hold their prices for over a week, and it's not at all uncommon for a desperately needed container ship full of timber to be scheduled for delivery to a local port, only to be redirected at the last minute to another continent for the simply reason that another professional buyer somewhere was willing to pay a better price.
America at least is in a luckier position that the UK. At least you have the option of inserting an additional rung on the housing ladder, in the form of American starter homes, which haven't really been built in any numbers in the US for perhaps 50 years. If anything, the expansion of this class of homes would actually lead to home value appreciation further up the housing ladder, because the faster accumulation of housing equity for younger people would necessarily mean an expanded consumer base through trading up. In the UK, we don't have this option. An archaic planning system, regulatory costs, and multiple decades of artificial scarcity created by government means that an acre of building land costs a million pounds in the south of England, and it's not uncommon for the largest companies to site 16 new builds per acre, when the maximum should really be about 6. We've been building rabbit hutches and selling them as homes for over 20 years. This means that even if the political will existed, a huge number of existing homeowners would face an uncertain future in terms of home values.
America still has a chance to avert disaster, but first it needs to face up to reality. It's really not that easy to provide hopeful migrants with even a semblance of the Western Dream when the numbers involved are legion. If anything, the system which encourages their strategic movement is likely to create nothing like an American Dream for more people, but rather the institution of a corporate and permanent governmental aristocracy and the advent of neo-feudalism. It's Gilded Age 2.0, all done under the guise of benevolent compassion.
Yes, those are just some of the beneficial knock-on effects.
A very substantial reform of the tax code would have to accompany this. Family formation and child-rearing is strongly discouraged by a punishing 40%+ theft of annual earnings through taxation (aka subsidizing foreign wars).
It never ceases to amaze me that the party which supposedly favors the working class (Democrats) is essentially pro-open-borders, while the party which supposedly favors open market capitalism (Republicans) is trying to enforce the border and reduce immigration.
During 2020-2022, we saw first hand what happens when even ~3% of unskilled workers left the workforce (in that case, mostly teenagers and early retirees). Wages skyrocketed-- in the Midwest, I saw $18-$20/hour for fast food or gas station jobs (up from $10-$11/hour just two years prior). When every company's #1 priority was holding onto their workers and recruiting new workers, we saw massive improvements to wages and benefits across the board. Other economic factors played into this as well, but reduction in the labor pool had massively positive results for unskilled labor.
The same would apply for real estate. Crummy studio apartments in bad parts of my B-tier Midwestern city are almost universally $1000+/mo (I recently helped a family member look for apartments). While it might seem like a steal to residents of a high cost-of-living city, the average unskilled food service worker here makes maybe $11-$14/hour (wages have since declined since the 2022 high). I don't think most people understand how radically a 5% increase in apartment availability could drive down rents in metropolitan areas.
It enrages me how these facts are reconciled by the liberal establishment. "Studies say that immigration is positive for the economy and undocumented immigrants contribute more in taxes than they receive in benefits". Many of the same people who are most affected by these policies (unskilled laborers) are not well equipped to understand how GDP growth does little to improve their individual economic situation. This should be the talking point of the party which is supposedly pro-free-market capitalism and favors the shareholder class. Illegal immigrants raise demand for and exert price-increases on both major expenses for a working class American: housing, and used car prices.
I can't say I support deportations en masse but the article is useful as an easy to understand example of how immigration hurts the average American.
Raise the bottom tax rate to have a flat rate for 95% of the population, and give a prebate to citizens only. America is like a rock concert with ticket prices set too low. And the cost of citizenship should be the annuity value of the prebate. Something like a quarter million dollars.
(Or use consumption taxes for raising that bottom rate: tariffs to make American industry to bring back good jobs for the not so academic, and carbon taxes to make the environmentalists happy and/or preserve oil for future generations.)
There are several reasons for this--one of them is the locals goats prefer to build coffin apartments. This has left a SFH shortage and builders offering incentives. Further, the high cost was driven by blackrock building what is now called "build to rent." They helped to inflate the market. Is there a shortage? It looks like the answer generally is no. In certain markets yes. Look at the homes that are being bundled and sold into pension funds as well. Inflation of the market happens right here. It is a scheme waiting for a crash.
Supply issues are also still a problem--takes in some places 6 weeks to get 2x12s. If you have not noticed, sawmills and paper plants are closing of late in the USA. I could go on.
In the end, Deportations would help, but only be a blip.
Not to get all libertardarian on this excellent post, but the various environmental rules on home construction, and on adding utilities to new home developments, insanely drives the prices up. The insanity of the open borders policies are matched by various layers of policy insanity elsewhere, combining to give us our dystopian outcomes.
Open borders serves their direct interests. And the environmental and policy goals seem to serve their emotional and neurotic wants.
If the now 60,000,000+ illegal alien migrant criminals are deported en masse and refused any future entry into the United States, the beneficial knock-on effects will be tremendous for this country.
Employers will be forced to pay something approximating a living wage. Housing prices will inevitably fall and young employed people will be able to purchase their first home. This will encourage family formation and the creation of 1, 2 and 3 children families. Without this, the United States will experience population collapse. These are the fruits of the Deathvax™️.
Any attempt to replace Americans with hordes of uneducated, unskilled illegals with nothing but contempt for our country, our language and our culture is tantamount to the destruction of the United States.
Those who advocate and facilitate this population replacement are TRAITORS…and must be punished under Rule of Law as such.
The correct pro-family government policies enacted strictly which encourage family formation and favor the well-being of children can yet save the United States from Marxist annihilation.
Nothing need be coerced or mandated. Create the conditions that promote the nuclear family and American families will thrive and multiply. That’s the human condition.
The first step is to rid ourselves of tens of millions of parasites whose unwelcome, unlawful presence in our country is destroying our economy and strangling OUR AMERICAN CHILDREN’S future.
You lay out a plan that makes way too much sense for any of the retards running this country to ever do. The necessary prerequisite to any is this is to replace our regime the way they’re trying to replace their citizenry. Only then will anything positive get done.
They would also raise wages and probably lower interest rates.
A very effective method: When a company is fined for hiring an illegal, pay part of the fine to the person who reported it. If the illegal reports himself, he gets to take $100,000 and go home.
https://simonlaird.substack.com/p/incentives-not-mass-deportation?r=9m3wb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
This is a banger
A history lesson on why you never, ever, accept large numbers of immigrants or refugees. (I learned this at a seminar at the United States War College back in the late 1980’s. As always stayed with me. I guarantee it’s not being taught now).
About the year a.d. 372 the Huns, an enormous Tartar horde from beyond the Don and Volga, burst into the lands north of the Euxine, and began to work their way westward. The first tribe that lay in their way, the nomadic race of the Alans, they almost exterminated. Then they fell upon the Goths. The Ostrogoths made a desperate attempt to defend the line of the Dniester against the oncoming savages—“men with faces that can hardly be called faces—rather shapeless black collops of flesh with little points instead of eyes; little in stature, but lithe and active, skilful in riding, broad shouldered, good at the bow, stiff-necked and proud, hiding under a barely human form the ferocity of the wild beast.” But the enemy whom the Gothic historian describes in these uninviting terms was too strong for the Teutons of the East. The Ostrogoths were crushed and compelled to become vassals of the Huns, save a remnant who fought their way southward to the Wallachian shore, near the marshes of the Delta of the Danube.
Then the Huns fell on the Visigoths. The wave of invasion pressed on; the Bug and the Pruth proved no barrier to the swarms of nomad bowmen, and the Visigoths, under their Duke Fritigern, fell back in dismay with their wives and children, their waggons and flocks and herds, till they found themselves with their backs to the Danube. Surrender to the enemy was more dreadful to the Visigoths than to their eastern brethren; they were more civilized, most of them were Christians, and the prospect of slavery to savages seems to have appeared intolerable to them.
Pressed against the Danube and the Roman border, the Visigoths sent in despair to ask permission to cross from the Emperor. A contemporary writer describes how they stood. “All the multitude that had escaped from the murderous savagery of the Huns—no less than 200,000 fighting men, besides women and old men and children—-were there on the river bank, stretching out their hands with loud lamentations, and earnestly supplicating leave to cross, bewailing their calamity, and promising that they would ever faithfully adhere to the imperial alliance if only the boon was granted them.”
The proposal of the Goths filled Valens with dismay. It was difficult to say which was more dangerous—to refuse a passage to 200,000 desperate men with arms in their hands and a savage foe at their backs, or to admit them within the line of river and fortress that protected the border, with an implied obligation to find land for them. After much doubting he chose the latter alternative: if the Goths would give hostages and surrender their arms, they should be ferried across the Danube and permitted to settle as subject-allies within the empire.
The Goths accepted the terms, gave up the sons of their chiefs as hostages, and streamed across the river as fast as the Roman Danube-flotilla could transport them. But no sooner had they reached Moesia than troubles broke out. The Roman officials at first tried to disarm the immigrants, but the Goths were unwilling to surrender their weapons, and offered large bribes to be allowed to retain them: in strict disobedience to the Emperor’s orders, the bribes were accepted and the Goths retained their arms. Further disputes soon broke out…. Fritigern, with many of his nobles, was dining with Count Lupicinus at the town of Marcianopolis, when some starving Goths tried to pillage the market by force. A party of Roman soldiers strove to drive them off, and were at once mishandled or slain. On hearing the tumult and learning its cause, Lupicinus recklessly bade his retinue seize and slay Fritigern and the other guests at his banquet. The Goths drew their swords and cut their way out of the palace. Then riding to the nearest camp of his followers, Fritigern told his tale, and bade them take up arms against Rome.
There followed a year of desperate fighting all along the Danube, and the northern slope of the Balkans. The Goths half-starved for many months, and smarting under the extortion and chicanery to which they had been subjected, soon showed that the old barbarian spirit was but thinly covered by the veneer of Christianity and civilization which they had acquired in the last half-century. The struggle resolved itself into a repetition of the great raids of the third century: towns were sacked and the open country harried in the old style, nor was the war rendered less fierce by the fact that many runaway slaves and other outcasts among the provincial population joined the invaders.
In 378 a.d., the main body of the Goths succeeded in forcing the line of the Balkans; they were not far from Adrianople when the Emperor started to attack them, with a splendid army of 60,000 men. Every one expected to hear of a victory, for the reputation of invincibility still clung to the legions, and after six hundred years of war the disciplined infantry of Rome, robur peditum, whose day had lasted since the Punic wars, were still reckoned superior, when fairly handled, to any amount of wild barbarians….
Valens found the main body of the Goths encamped in a great “laager,” on the plain north of Adrianople. After some abortive negotiations he developed an attack on their front, when suddenly a great body of horsemen charged in on the Roman flank. It was the main strength of the Gothic cavalry, which had been foraging at a distance; receiving news of the fight it had ridden straight for the battle field. Some Roman squadrons which covered the left flank of the Emperor’s army were ridden down and trampled under foot. Then the Goths swept down on the infantry of the left wing, rolled it up, and drove it in upon the centre. So tremendous was their impact that legions and cohorts were pushed together in hopeless confusion. Every attempt to stand firm failed, and in a few minutes left, centre, and reserve, were one undistinguishable mass. Imperial guards, light troops, lancers, auxiliaries, and infantry of the line were wedged together in a press that grew closer every moment.
The Roman cavalry saw that the day was lost, and rode off without another effort. Then the abandoned infantry realized the horror of their position: equally unable to deploy or to fly, they had to stand to be cut down. Men could not raise their arms to strike a blow, so closely were they packed; spears snapped right and left, their bearers being unable to lift them to a vertical position; many soldiers were stifled in the press. Into this quivering mass the Goths rode, plying lance and sword against the helpless enemy. It was not till forty thousand men had fallen that the thinning of the ranks enabled the survivors to break out and follow their cavalry in a headlong flight. They left behind them, dead on the field, the Emperor, the Grand Masters of the Infantry and Cavalry, the Count of the Palace, and thirty-five commanders of different corps.
The battle of Adrianople was the most fearful defeat suffered by a Roman army since Cannæ, a slaughter to which it is aptly compared by the contemporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus. The army of the East was almost annihilated, and was never reorganized again on the old Roman lines.
Only six years after permitting hundreds of thousands of poor desperate refugees to cross the river and reach the safety of Roman lands, the Emperor Valens and fifty thousand of his best soldiers were dead at their hands. Seventeen years later, Alaric the Goth ruled over the north, and “wandered far and wide, from the Danube to the gates of Constantinople, and from Constantinople to Greece, ransoming or sacking every town in his way till the Goths were gorged with plunder.”
38 years after the Goths crossed the Danube, Alaric the Goth sacked Rome itself. One has to observe that it may not take 38 years this time.
Never, ever, accept immigrants or refugees. Thus endth the lesson.
Konstantin Kisin recently made a good argument in his opening statement in a debate which he then added to his Triggernometry Podcast- 3% of people in the UK though that immigration was a major issue in 1995. By 2015 that number was 56%. That's not a shift to the Far Right as many in the media would maintain- it's the fact that ordinary people live closer to reality than elites. As anyone who has ever visited Expat communities around the world will tell you, the market dominant migrants at the top of the socioeconomic spectrum with which most elites in the West are familiar, are highly atypical- they tend to self-sort on the basis of income and interest rather than ghettoise on the basis of shared culture, they integrate seamlessly to Western cultures and values and even take up social hobbies like baking or choir singing.
Nobody gives a shit about sane levels of legal migration. The toxicity of the debate centres around the insane Open Society edicts imposed from on high which necessarily entail mass migration in unprecedented numbers. Thanks for mentioning the difficulties of housing production. Home building is one of those areas where the efficient-market hypothesis simply doesn't hold. Increased demand doesn't always equal increased supply. Even if one presumes a massive Federal Libertarian shift towards property holders being legally empowered to build new houses on their land, reducing scarcity costs to harness the forgotten power of the nation that built Liberty ships for the world to create a generation of starter homes for young Americans desperate for the lost promise of the American Dream, it wouldn't necessarily mean that the capacity exists to reverse the rise of corporate rentier economics, it might not be enough.
Global building material supply chains are stretched to the limit. It's a good sector to keep a keen eye on for the purposes of investment. Most building suppliers won't hold their prices for over a week, and it's not at all uncommon for a desperately needed container ship full of timber to be scheduled for delivery to a local port, only to be redirected at the last minute to another continent for the simply reason that another professional buyer somewhere was willing to pay a better price.
America at least is in a luckier position that the UK. At least you have the option of inserting an additional rung on the housing ladder, in the form of American starter homes, which haven't really been built in any numbers in the US for perhaps 50 years. If anything, the expansion of this class of homes would actually lead to home value appreciation further up the housing ladder, because the faster accumulation of housing equity for younger people would necessarily mean an expanded consumer base through trading up. In the UK, we don't have this option. An archaic planning system, regulatory costs, and multiple decades of artificial scarcity created by government means that an acre of building land costs a million pounds in the south of England, and it's not uncommon for the largest companies to site 16 new builds per acre, when the maximum should really be about 6. We've been building rabbit hutches and selling them as homes for over 20 years. This means that even if the political will existed, a huge number of existing homeowners would face an uncertain future in terms of home values.
America still has a chance to avert disaster, but first it needs to face up to reality. It's really not that easy to provide hopeful migrants with even a semblance of the Western Dream when the numbers involved are legion. If anything, the system which encourages their strategic movement is likely to create nothing like an American Dream for more people, but rather the institution of a corporate and permanent governmental aristocracy and the advent of neo-feudalism. It's Gilded Age 2.0, all done under the guise of benevolent compassion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHXb6ZBKFpY&t=1329s
Yes, those are just some of the beneficial knock-on effects.
A very substantial reform of the tax code would have to accompany this. Family formation and child-rearing is strongly discouraged by a punishing 40%+ theft of annual earnings through taxation (aka subsidizing foreign wars).
It never ceases to amaze me that the party which supposedly favors the working class (Democrats) is essentially pro-open-borders, while the party which supposedly favors open market capitalism (Republicans) is trying to enforce the border and reduce immigration.
During 2020-2022, we saw first hand what happens when even ~3% of unskilled workers left the workforce (in that case, mostly teenagers and early retirees). Wages skyrocketed-- in the Midwest, I saw $18-$20/hour for fast food or gas station jobs (up from $10-$11/hour just two years prior). When every company's #1 priority was holding onto their workers and recruiting new workers, we saw massive improvements to wages and benefits across the board. Other economic factors played into this as well, but reduction in the labor pool had massively positive results for unskilled labor.
The same would apply for real estate. Crummy studio apartments in bad parts of my B-tier Midwestern city are almost universally $1000+/mo (I recently helped a family member look for apartments). While it might seem like a steal to residents of a high cost-of-living city, the average unskilled food service worker here makes maybe $11-$14/hour (wages have since declined since the 2022 high). I don't think most people understand how radically a 5% increase in apartment availability could drive down rents in metropolitan areas.
It enrages me how these facts are reconciled by the liberal establishment. "Studies say that immigration is positive for the economy and undocumented immigrants contribute more in taxes than they receive in benefits". Many of the same people who are most affected by these policies (unskilled laborers) are not well equipped to understand how GDP growth does little to improve their individual economic situation. This should be the talking point of the party which is supposedly pro-free-market capitalism and favors the shareholder class. Illegal immigrants raise demand for and exert price-increases on both major expenses for a working class American: housing, and used car prices.
I can't say I support deportations en masse but the article is useful as an easy to understand example of how immigration hurts the average American.
Based.
Yea but we can’t afford to do this, we’re too busy sending millions of dollars to fund wars.
I can't believe this was published at AG.
Raise the bottom tax rate to have a flat rate for 95% of the population, and give a prebate to citizens only. America is like a rock concert with ticket prices set too low. And the cost of citizenship should be the annuity value of the prebate. Something like a quarter million dollars.
(Or use consumption taxes for raising that bottom rate: tariffs to make American industry to bring back good jobs for the not so academic, and carbon taxes to make the environmentalists happy and/or preserve oil for future generations.)
And reduce demand led inflation generally.
Housing prices are actually decreasing now.
There are several reasons for this--one of them is the locals goats prefer to build coffin apartments. This has left a SFH shortage and builders offering incentives. Further, the high cost was driven by blackrock building what is now called "build to rent." They helped to inflate the market. Is there a shortage? It looks like the answer generally is no. In certain markets yes. Look at the homes that are being bundled and sold into pension funds as well. Inflation of the market happens right here. It is a scheme waiting for a crash.
Supply issues are also still a problem--takes in some places 6 weeks to get 2x12s. If you have not noticed, sawmills and paper plants are closing of late in the USA. I could go on.
In the end, Deportations would help, but only be a blip.