Yes, the people who barely have clothing, risked human trafficking and perilous sea crossings are after my job, livelihood, or whatever.
Fucking conservatives and their mental gymnastics all to serve capitalism
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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It's always "Immigrants are stealing our jobs!"
And never "The company owner hired an immigrant!"
Shows you just how fucked up these people are.
I think people raised under conservatism, like people raised under capitalism in general, have a counterintuitive and antisocial instinct to "punch down".
Capitalism teaches us wealth and power come from hard work and merit, if people are poor it's because they don't work hard and have no merit, and that poor people are fundamentally bad people.
So if they have to choose between blaming poor migrants who are willing to work for low wages - or are forced to work for low wages, because the law doesn't allow them to work legally or access the legal protections of citizen workers - or blaming rich, powerful business owners who decide to exploit these poor migrants, that instinct overrides logic.
The column on the right could contain any group of people 'othered' by the right wing and it would still be valid.
The column on the right should also contain the fact that many of those horrific situations people are fleeing from were directly caused or intentionally exacerbated by the very same right wing government officials perpetrating all the shit on the other column
Exactly.
I wished fascists could read, maybe then we wouldnt need a meme lile that to explain a very simple thing.
But here we are, people so dumb they believe any shit that comes out of a Russian fake-news-farm.
And please dont give me the "but but but they are like us! Giving names doesnt solve a thing!" Bullshit.
If they were like me, i wouldnt need to write this shit in 2024.
Unfortunately it seems like people listen and believe whatever they want, while the truth is complex, messy, and difficult.
No amount of crayons and slowly drawn pictures can make those people change their minds.
As Nixon (?) said: tell someone they're better than a visible minority, and they'll give you their last cent (or something to that effect)
That's the one, thank you.
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Are you suggesting that hundreds of thousands people that are not yet have found their waybin the country are not putting a massive strain on the social infrastructure?
Hundreds of thousands compared to what? That's a rounding error compared to 450 million Europeans for example.
If we're talking Europe as a whole, there are quite a few more refugees coming here. Around 6 million every year, according to the European Commission.
That is the total number of refugees hosted in the EU, not the yearly figure.
Nope, that's 23 million.
Source? Because that is not what the source you linked before says. And also highly unlikely because the global number of refugees according to the same source was 36.4 million at mid-2023.
According to the source, yes, there are currently 36 million refugees globally. Around 10% of those are in the EU. That's 3.6 million.
And that's still the total and not the yearly increase, although admittedly the total did increase recently quite a bit due to the war in Ukraine. And it is still a tiny number compared to the total population in the EU.
Yes, I was conflating the numbers of immigrants with the number of refugees.
According to the link above, 6.98 million people immigrated to the EU in 2022. In the same year, around 1 million new asylum claims were filed.
You are confusing immigrants with refugees. Most of the regular immigration is due to people taking up jobs and is coming from nearby non-EU countries like the UK.
Which we're lucky to have cuz we don't have enough kids.
Yes! But facts matter.
True that
Except that the "facts" are not supported by the source they linked.
O
We don't have enough kids because many families that would like to have kids can't afford them.
Yap our civ is like a trap
Truth is we need people so we are lucky to get them
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So y'all don't see a connection with overwhelmed local community infrastructure, the lack of affordable housing, not investing in enough in schools and healthcare, and a tidal wave of immigrants at ridiculously high levels?
Yeah, not all problems are connected, but some are. And while it's ultimately the fault of the politicians for creating the immigration policies, immigrants still have free will.
There is no "tidal wave" of immigrants anywhere in Europe nor in other "developed" countries. All the problems you mention exist on their own and would affect the local population just as much if there were no immigrants. Edit: we could argue about "immigrants" Vs. "refugees" here, but the regular immigrants don't come in small boats.
That's a straight up lie and you know it. 8 million in 4 years is a tidal wave no matter how you slice it.
Source? There are not even 8 million refugees in all of the EU together. The total refugee population is around 7 million in the entire EU.
And even if they would have all arrived in the last 4 years (which they didn't, less than half did & mostly from Ukraine), that "tidal wave" of around 1.5% of the total population sure is massive /s
Edit: The 8 million "immigrants" figure for the US is fake news as well.
Fact check: what are the numbers on "ridiculously high levels"?
At least 8 million that we encountered during Biden's admin alone. https://budget.house.gov/imo/media/doc/ogr_icymi.pdf
That's a fake figure some Republicans pulled out of their ass: https://www.factcheck.org/2024/02/breaking-down-the-immigration-figures/
By Gods, that is an official document from what is supposed to be an oversight committee? It reads like a biased propaganda sheet with no references and spelling mistakes everywhere.
I see it says 8 million "migrant encounters" yet there is no source for that figure stated (only numerous other reports from the same committee). Is it 8 million different people? Did they all come in this year? Who is reporting the figure?
Also I'd like to know the definition of a "migrant encounter". That doesn't even state they are illegal migrants, or that there was anything illegal about the encounter. Who are they encountering?
So y'all don't see a connection with overwhelmed local community infrastructure, the lack of affordable housing, not investing in enough in schools and healthcare, and a tidal wave of immigrants at ridiculously high levels?
No. I don't.
The problem is not immigrants.
The problem is a broken government system that fails to allocate resources effectively.
The problem is whole ass political parties are incentivized to keep the system broken so they can blame immigrants and leftists/liberals and get votes.
I mean, if you make it illegal for an undocumented immigrant to get a driver's license, you don't get to complain that undocumented immigrants are driving without licenses. If you make it illegal for undocumented immigrants to work legal jobs, you can't complain that undocumented immigrants are working under the table for sketchy employers at shit wages. You know?
There's only so many resources, no country can take millions of people in a single year and ramp up quickly enough to handle them.
I disagree. Countries don't have to "handle" people. Most people can handle themselves - if the laws and government allow it. Immigrants don't want to live in poverty and dependent on welfare any more than citizens do. They want to work, they want to have homes, they want to support themselves and their families. And if they get forced into accepting welfare or engaging in illegal work or criminal activity, it's because a broken immigration system doesn't allow them to live or work legally.
Ninety percent of the "border crisis" in the US or the "refugee crisis" in Europe could be solved if countries just let people in and gave them work permits.
Some people need help, I realize. And if social services in Western countries weren't so overloaded and underfunded by bad government policies they'd have room to help immigrants as well.
I mean, one in three calories produced in the United States is thrown away. Wasted. When you complain about food banks being overloaded by hungry immigrants, don't blame the immigrants, blame the stores that dump millions of dollars of product straight into dumpsters covered with bleach, and the laws that allow it.
Ten percent of homes in the United States are vacant. When you complain about housing costs being driven up by immigration, don't blame the immigrants, blame the landlords who let houses and apartments sit empty to keep rents high, and the laws that allow it.
And so on and so forth. If immigrants are "straining" our systems - and that strain has been much exaggerated in the media - it's not because we don't have enough resources. It's because we badly mismanage the resources we have. It's not a resource issue, it's a policy issue.
The problems you point out are due to underfunding and under provisioning all these services. There is no tidal wave, just money not allocated in the right places.
Too true and high effort to be a meme
I generally agree with the sentiment, and I generally view immigration as a positive. That being said, to suggest that immigration doesn't put any kind of pressure on housing, employment, and social services (at least short term, probably not long term), will defeat your argument before it reaches the ears of the people who need to hear the rest of it.
There is such a thing as good immigration policies and the benefits often outweigh the cost. But even if they don't they are dwarfed by the other issues mentioned here.
Immigrants are not only not a detriment to society, they are in fact a positive. Even the ones people in my area get mad about despite being hours and hours by interstate from the nearest border. More workers means more shit can get done, everything you're mad about is because the system sucks and is designed to keep us in poverty.
People act like jobs are a non-renewable resource that, once filled, that's all you get. This is a total misunderstanding of how consumer based economies work. Economic activity is demand driven. More consumers = more demand = more jobs. This is obvious if you think about it. It's why cities can exist rather than collapse once hitting a certain population because all the jobs are taken and no one can work anymore. It's why you find way more opportunities in cities rather than podunk rural villages.
Where the trouble comes in is that the population growth and job opportunities growth doesn't necessarily happen at exactly the same rate at exactly the same time. There can be pain in the transitional period between when the population growth happens, and when the new demand stimulates the new job opportunities. That isn't a reason to try and stifle the population growth. It's a political issue. Something like universal basic services (or UBI), or a universal jobs guarantee where the government puts people to work on infrastructure projects (social housing in particular seems like a good idea) or the like, like New Deal era USA did until they can find something more to their liking would do a lot to soothe that pain.
Ultimately, the new economic activity that's created from the growth is a good thing and ought to be embraced.
An asshole billionaire fleeing from something is also a situation I can't comprehend but, on the other hand, fuck 'em.