Photo by Mehdi Sepehri
US Immigration Talking Points
- Immigration is driving growth in the labor market.
A new Brookings report has found that new immigrant workers are allowing the U.S. labor market to boom. Immigration has enabled the U.S. to accommodate higher job growth than forecasters expected and helped bring down price pressures. 1
Immigration is good for the economy. 1
- Countries with lower birth rates require immigration to sustain economic growth (assuming we want that).
Keeping prices down and adding to demand in the economy.
No one’s running on [immigration as a pro-growth policy] because it’s an accidental success. 1
- Crops rotting in the field: How the immigration debate is keeping food off the table
- Working age immigrants contribute to social security
as boomers continue retiring and America’s ratio of retirees-to-workers rises, larger tax increases would be ‘required to sustain today’s benefit levels through the 2040s. But there is a simple way to alleviate this problem: We could allow more prime-age adults to come to the United States and contribute to its economy.
- If we didn’t have the immigration, you’d see a lot of bottlenecks to growth. 2
Compassion
We are all refugees in the storm of samsara.
In seeking refuge, we also seek to become a refuge for other beings, whoever they may be.
~ Erik Jampa
Interdependence
Immigrants are good for your GDP, but fuck your GDP. Honestly, that is a secondary benefit. The primary focus, I think, should be on the moral case, or the human argument, and I think there are two basic ways to make it. One is to talk about this border: where was it drawn, how was it drawn there, and who drew it? And if you look at pretty much any country in the world right now, and we can just stick with the United States for our current audience, the way that we drew this border line, and the reason we drew it where we did, is because we engaged in genocidal slaughter of the people who lived here before, we needed a train line running from the ports around Louisiana to the southwest coast, and we stole it through bloody conquest of Mexico. So, that’s how we drew this line that we now purport to say that is ours, and we can decide who gets to cross and not. And the second is, you can look towards any religion or any set of moral code in the world, and it says to help the aggrieved neighbor.
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Or maybe we can go back even to a more basic principle of do no harm. And, of course, we are doing harm throughout the world. If we look and start to pick apart why people are coming from where they’re coming, you will see that some are sailing forth on a little vacation or maybe just want to change their home, but in large regard, they have been displaced from their home because of policies—economic, military, or other—that we are currently implementing and have been implementing for centuries.When you look at Haiti, Central America, different parts of Mexico, and different parts of Africa and try to understand why people are fleeing—you start to pick apart and scratch the surface a little bit—you realize that maybe we had something to do with that. So, if we destroyed someone else’s home, maybe we shouldn’t deny them the basic human rights to move and try to find a new one.3
Open Borders
We can’t go through all 21 arguments here, but you make the case that if we were to open the border, one thing that people fear, which is that suddenly the entire world moves to the United States, is probably not going to happen. People actually like their communities and their families; it’s just that they get squeezed out by certain kinds of pressure. But ultimately, immigrating is not something people are suddenly inclined to do. You debunk a number of ideas, like the ideas of brain drain and nationalism.3