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Decades of talkings heads offering an explanation for rural decline, that’s how. Look back to Rush Limbaugh and his predecessors.
The irony is rampant immigration (and our tolerance to it) was an economic miracle for the US, an envy of the world. We’d be facing a population cliff like S Korea, Japan, China or Russia without it. But now that’s coming for us too :(
Definitely a misdirect from the corporate takeover of everything.
I grew up in a shitty small rural town, but while I was in high school I watched the shitty “mom and pop” stores slowly disappear and the local factory vote against unionization only to be closed a few years after I moved away. You know what immediately moved in to fill the void? Wal-Mart and Dollar General.
My dad was so focused on immigrants taking his job and other insane republican economic talking points that he lost that job when the company decided it wasn’t cost effective to operate in the US anymore.
You must have lived down the street from me. We had a few mom and pop joints, two local restaurants, and "the plant". They didn't get Walmart but now they've got the world's worst Dairy Queen, the world's second worst Sonic, and two different brands of dollar store.
TBH some of the points were right. Democrats took big bucks from corporations too, especially Big Tech and basically anything focused in metros.
And it was also a distraction.
Rural folks should have voted differently, yeah, but it was an easy trap to fall into. I blame propagandists and cowards taking money, not them.
The "population cliff" is a made up boogeyman for capitalists. That's because they've relied on population growth for market growth. What's the harm in population stagnation or even decline?
And I don't want to hear about young people supporting aging populations. That's a man-made problem that has solutions. Just not the kind of solutions capitalists can abide. (and if you think about it, it's a temporary issue anyway).
And I don’t want to hear about young people supporting aging populations. That’s a man-made problem that has solutions.
Well, okay. I have a bridge to sell you.
Look. Everything is a “man made” issue with solutions.
It doesn’t matter what economic system we want or have; fact is something has to put a ton of work into taking care of old folks, unless you kill them off or let them rot. Hope and ideology isn’t going to fix one’s body/mind, and that has nothing to do with capitalism.
…Will we automate the problem away some day, WallE/Star Trek style? Sure. That’s the goal. But we aren’t close to there yet. Overloading the young taking care of the old IS our short term problem, and we have plenty of land to support a growing population with room for expanding conservation, as long as we don’t do stupid shit like ranch excessively and expand oil. Then we can level off the population. But we can’t do any of that if entire counties collapse from the pressure/burden of support.
But okay. Let’s say tomorrow, every country on the planet rises up, abandons capitalism, and embraces cooperative economics, with a magic snap of the fingers. That’d be great.
But we continue to let populations in developed countries age.
Then what?
How does that change the needs of elderly folks at all? How does that change the math of young people needing to devote more and more of their energy to them?
Because any kind of minority is inferior to white straight people and they're the reason for every ill in the world today.
It's truly just racism. It's worked for 4000 years, since the establishment of civilizations.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." - LBJ
Easy.
There is a huge portion of the country, about 1/3, that knows they aren't living the American dream, but they work hard and don't understand why.
Then, someone tells them something slightly true. That there's not enough pie to go around (semi-true), and that the reason there's not enough pie is all the immigrants and freeloaders who aren't working and are taking handouts (false).
What they aren't told is there could be enough pie to go around, if the top 1% was willing to share. They aren't. And they now control ~35% of wealth in the USA.
And then the top 1% uses that extra capital to tell that 1/3 of people that their Hispanic neighbor is the problem.
a big chunk of that bloc is first gen immigrants themselves.
all my 2nd gen immigrant friends have parents who hate new immigrants and support ICE type policies and are big Trump fans.
My favorite is when MAGAts claim immigrants are taking our jobs, while also claiming immigrants are sucking off the government teat getting free rent, healthcare ect because they are too lazy to work. Schrödinger's immigrant.
Never forget that many of the the biggest MAGA bootlickers have their income subsidized by the government…
Red states boast cheaper... everything, because they get money from all the blue states. Buncha welfare queens.
"Fuck you, I've got mine"
That's German and Irish immigrants to the US and their descendants being portrayed as doing the same to Chinese immigrants in 1870
As drawn by a German-American immigrant cartoonist, no less.
Racism.
You can't think of a single thing an immigrant has made worse?
Then you must not heard of Elon Musk.
It puts downward pressure on wages. That pressure is way overblown by Republicans and there are plenty of solutions to address it that don't involve sending icestapo in to break up families though.
Pretending that this pressure doesn't exist just makes people like us who want to stop this seem out of touch to the normal person who has concerns about immigration, which the election showed is a very large chunk of Americans and westerners in general.
These concerns should be addressed by showing the relative magnitude of the problem compared to benefits gained from immigration along with solutions for stagnating wages, not outright dismissal.
It puts downward pressure on wages
This is not the fault of immigrants. It's the fault of billionaires exploiting one of the most vulnerable people in the country for profit. It only exists because of capitalist greed.
People hardly ever bring up how any company that knowingly hires illegal immigrants should be fined out of business. But of course it’s the workers that must face the consequences.
Theoretically, it decreases the value of labor, but there's so many better solutions to that problem.
In a world where AI fervor is already tanking the cost of labor, I doubt you could even measure the impact of immigrants.
This is the part that's especially amusing to me.
conservatives: "NOOOOO DEY TERK ER JERBS"
Meanwhile, the exact same conservatives: "Ooooooo, AI!"
That really only applies if it's difficult for the immigrants to become citizens (ie undocumented) or if their immigration status is tied to their employment (ie h1b) that artificially drive down the value of their labor. The current setup is basically indentured servitude with extra steps.
The explanation is racism.
Illegals are KILLING People!
-Supporters of ICE!
I know you're joking, but illegal immigrants do kill people, just at a lower rate than the general population.
A big part of the problem is that if you're an illegal immigrant, then you have a huge incentive to keep your fucking head down and not be noticed.
So you don't notice the vast majority whose only crime was illegally entering the country. Meanwhile, the ones who do commit crimes make national news because some people have an agenda in spreading that type of news.
Those are two things I think someone might say about immigrants. Additionally, there's general disdain for the poor and many immigrants come here to escape worse poverty.
there are several immigrants that made things worst: melania, THIEL, musk, cruz, . just not the ones that came with no money.
All my favorite food and culture comes from regions I am not native.
My brother, who dropped out of school, lays carpet. He is very mad about immigrants "takin' our jerbs". He is also not a very good employee and miserably failed when he tried to start his own business...he wanted to be the boss without doing any work himeself... I imagine most people have made poor life choices and just need someone to blame.
I had a pretty funny discussion where someone was like "they're bussing them in so they vote democrat!" And I was like, but they're not registered to vote. "Well the democrats want to change that." But most immigrants lean heavily republican, and are anti immigration as well, sort of a pull up the ladder behind you thing. "Well because even they know what the democrats are doing is stupid!"
And then 5 minutes later they're saying the first line, when they just agreed the exact opposite is true... it's like the facts are only true if it supports the argument that they're making at that exact instant
I live in Canada. While it is not the fault of individual immigrants, even the Government of Canada and big banks have admitted that abuse of the International Student and TFW programs has put a lot of strain of public infrastructure and housing supply and has suppressed wages. These issues have absolutely objectively affected the average Canadian.
Every now and then you get someone on social media try to be smart and smugly say something like, "International Students can't afford to buy a house. Explain to me how they're driving up the cost of housing." But they fail to realise it increases demand for rentals, and people buy single family homes to rent the rooms to those students, and so the demand for those rentals drives up the cost of houses.
You can acknowledge that not all immigration is good without blaming individual immigrants themselves. I'm always shocked when people who understand infinite growth is a fallacy when it comes to the corporate world, don't understand that trying to grow the population into infinity year after year is just the government equivalent of that fallacy.
Well, large tech corporations often cut costs by falsely listing impossible to meet job descriptions and then use that to ask the government for an excuse to hire a foreign worker, who they will hire despite not meeting the job descriptions either, but is willing to work for a fraction of what the domestic worker can afford to live on.
So there is that
But that's not the fault of those immigrants, who are just looking for a better opportunity; that's on the corporations abusing a system that is supposed to improve the domestic economy by bringing in top talent to American industry, not by displacing domestic employees and depressing wages.
And uh, also, the conservative wing and the administration isn't really upset about that at all, either.
The main thing immigrants bring is change. Change to the culture, the language and all of that. In general, people don't like change. But it is well established that not changing means a culture will be left behind.
They and their families are operating convenience stores 24/7 for about $5/hr because existing Americans refuse to experience this thankless task!
Oh noes!
We're fools to not recognize the humanitarian benefits of Bodega Cats!
Rich people said poor people have no health care because poorer people get sick sometimes.
It does keep wages down on a lot of blue collar manual labor jobs. That's about it, but that does happen with a certainty. I used to work new construction housing. Framers, drywallers, cement layers, and roofers etc either work for less money, or end up not working because the company with Mexican laborors making $5+ an hour less underbids everyone else and the "builder" subcontracts out to that operation.
It's why so many of those laborors don't want immigrants. They see it directly effecting them, while so many others are completely ok with immigrants. It doesn't effect most other people's paycheck and it doesn't raise prices of anything they buy.
The immigrants didn't ask for 5$ less.
It is the company owner who abuses the immigrant's legal status to pay them 5$ less.
There is a TON of anti-immigrant propaganda. Whenever the economy is shit -- which it often is now, because of the massive disparity between rich and poor -- immigration is an easy target.
It's easy to say things like market rates for labor are lowered due to an influx of immigrant labor, or that immigrants are taking jobs. There is a good case to be made that things like the H1-B program do artificially lower wages and do mean that there are fewer jobs for citizens -- but the spin is always against the immigrants and never against the companies exploiting them.
They're wrongfully attributing to the immigrants what should be attributed to corporations, businesses and the extremely wealthy who are exploiting and trafficking immigrants.
Having to hear foreign languages and smell cuisine I'm not used to in my own country is basically a violation of my human rights. Like, isn't that in The Geneva Convention?
Most of the things people listed in this comment section isn't a problem with immigration, but a problem with greedy rich people. Immigrants just get falsely labeled with these problems. Chop off the heads of the rich along with their entire bloodline and we'd have a lot less issues.
Surpressed wages. Immigration is just a consequence of the bourgeoisie war against the proletariat. It works double for them because they can blame the immigrants that they bring in for people's problems and can use them to make those problems worse.
You aren't going to find pro immigrant leftists. You will find humanitarian leftists that think the people the right bring here should be treated like people.
Many people, when they look out at the world, all they want to see is themselves reflected back at them. When they see something else, they feel afraid.
My personal explanation:
These are people who weren't here when those voters were children and a large part of the population are voting to stop time, not policies or anything.
Their eyes are offended by the very sight of someone different from them.
Elon Musk immigrated from South Africa to the US, so I can think of at least one thing that made things distinctly worse in the US at least.
