by godix » Fri May 18, 2007 2:25 am
If we're concerned about the effect on the first world nations we could educate these people to a minimum employable level. We could teach them their host countries culture. We can bury them in paperwork and background checks and tracking their movements so we know who's coming in and that dangerous elements are hiding among them. We could deny them from permanently living off the state. We could point them to sectors of the economy that need reasonably cheap labor. We could, and should, do all those things to minimize the initial impact. Long term we don't need to worry about because the Vietnamese refugees of 30 years ago are turning into one of the best educated, highest earning, and high tax paying minority groups of today so long term this would probably help actually. But that's all secondary. Of primary importance is 'Are you a violent criminal? Are you a health risk? No? Come on in.'
I think I wasn't clear what I was talking about in my first post. I'm not talking about immigration of the educated and those able to afford to run through the system. I'm not even talking about immigration of those that have skills and do work Americans don't want to. I'm talking about the person who's life in their home country is so fucking shitty that even if they ended up as a homeless bum living in a back alley of some first world country they'd STILL be vastly better off. I'm talking the Africans who go to EU not for a job but rather because they'll end up dead in some petty tribal war if they stay home. I'm talking people so desperate they try to cross oceans in, literally, a barrel. I'm talking the type of person who actually thinks illegally coming to America and doing tons of hours of back breaking work at below minimum wage is better than staying at home and starving cause there are no jobs. These aren't people that can pay 1/3 their savings to immigrate because their savings isn't even enough to buy a value meal at McDonalds. These aren't people you put in factories to make shit because these are people who's sole employment to date has been watching a yak defecate to fertilize a field. These are the people, to use todays major US immigration announcement, who you don't ask to pay a $5,000 fine because that's their yearly salary and they're feeding their entire extended family in their home country with it. Will letting those people in a first world country cost money? Of course. But I personally live in the richest country in the world and feel I have no right to look at someone who only gets food to eat three days out of the week and say "Sorry, can't do anything, after all you might take all the quickie mart jobs or make my taxes go up a few percent"?
Let's use a specific example here. Sudan. Currently it's a hellhole in middle of a genocide that no one will call genocide because if they did they'd have to do something about it. Instead the world just stands around wringing it's hands and writing harsh editorials to each other. Now one solution to the problem is just letting it go on, eventually they'll succeed in their genocide and that's the end of that problem. Which is the approach the world is currently taking. Another option is to send in troops to stop this but Europe takes years to see the need to stop a genocide even when it's next door, they barely notice one happening on a different continent. As for America, Iraq has turned Americans even more self centered and isolationist than the shortsighted ignorant bastards usually are. My view provides a third alternative. Send in troops for a very short time. Just long enough to ask all the people sitting in camps waiting to be killed 'So do you want to live in America, the EU, Canada, Australia, etc or you wanna stay here?' Then load up everyone who wants to go on a cargo plane and give them citizenship in some first world country. No long protracted military mission. No hundreds of billions being spent, with greedy bastards skimming off the top every step of the way, into trying to turn a shithole into a little bit less than a shithole. Oh yeah, and as a minor side benefit that's so trivial it's barely worth mentioning, hundreds of thousands of lives would be saved. And, incidentally, greatly improved while we're at it.
So it'll cost some money to educate these people to an employable standard. So they end up taking many jobs from the bottom rung of the economic ladder. So social services will end up costing more. Doesn't matter. Hundreds of thousands of lives are saved. In one country. Imagine the sheer number of people this would help worldwide. We could do more aid to people in the third world than the UN has done during it's entire history if we just said "Ok, you can leave there if you want. It's worth a slight raise in taxes. Welcome."
