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The Forum > Article Comments > Mr Obama: Tear down that wall! (Open the borders and share the chaos) > Comments

Mr Obama: Tear down that wall! (Open the borders and share the chaos) : Comments

By Barry York, published 26/11/2014

The elephant-in-the-room in all current discussions of immigration is the question of 'open borders'.

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As I understand it, Mr Obama is not tearing down any walls or opening up any common borders, just allowing a few long term economic migrants, all currently employed tax paying workers, to apply for permanent residency?

Which would then allow, their American born offspring to claim their birthright, or citizenship!
And if that means a few obscenely wealthy Americans have to finally pay the going rate; not before time!

I mean, come on! They can stay if we can continue to exploit them, and then deport them; along with their then useless social security stamps, when they've arrived at their use by date! Yes?

Not only does the Author go the patent verbal, but that self evident verbal is just the most downright disingenuous mendacity, and risible rubbish/verbal vomit, I've forced myself to read!

The only outstanding feature that allowed the Nazis to commit all their many atrocities and or mass murder; was the complete lack of normal human empathy; none of which is on display, in any part of this verbal/horse manure!?
Rhrosty.
Posted by Rhrosty, Wednesday, 26 November 2014 11:41:40 AM
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I wonder how much less unemployment & misery of native born Americans there would be, if there were not 12 million illegal immigrants taking their jobs.

Isn't it so like lefties to want to give away that that is not theirs. Our heritage is not the toy of some lefty ratbag. It is ours, not theirs.

Obama is merely taking a step to increasing the lefty vote. The objective is to ultimately import left voters. There can be no advantage to any American citizen of not deporting these gate crashers.

It is the same here. Labor are soft on Muslim criminal activity, & general antisocial behaviour, as they want & get the Muslim vote.

Disgusting that these lefties want to throw away all our fathers fought for, just to buy a few lousy votes.
Posted by Hasbeen, Wednesday, 26 November 2014 11:58:35 AM
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Rhrosty,
We'll have to wait and see how many Mexicans take up Obama's offer, if going above ground means they have to pay income tax then the numbers aren't going to be anything like 4-5 million.
The unions are also going to have a field day with all these new potential recruits so if the uptake of amnesty is high it could actually cause a wage breakout and inflation if employers are required to pay union scale, payroll tax, insurance etc on their previously low paid underground workforce.
Posted by Jay Of Melbourne, Wednesday, 26 November 2014 3:37:06 PM
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Ah, the joy of unreconstructed Marxism. If Marx was right in 1848 that :

“National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible…”

Then wouldn’t we have expected them to have disappeared by now?

I suspect open border policies work best between countries with similar levels of economic development, similar welfare systems and, perhaps, similar cultures. None of the anti-immigration spruikers we hear in Australia objects to the free movement of New Zealanders into Australia and vice versa. In the UK, one of the reasons popular sentiment against free movement of EU citizens has grown is so-called “welfare tourism”, where people move from poorer EU countries to take advantage of the UK’s relatively generous social welfare systems. The government is now considering limiting the entitlement of non-British citizens to social benefits.

In fact, there is evidence that the extent of popular resentment against immigration may be directly and inversely related to the generosity of the social welfare net, which may be why Australians are much more concerned about illegal immigration than Americans, even though the USA has far more of them.

http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/radio/onairhighlights/new-study-compares-us-australian-attitudes-to-migrants

For free-marketeers like me the answer is easy – let people come as long as they support themselves. But for Lefties like Barrie this is a dilemma – people will either welcome poor migrants, or be generous to them, but not both.
Posted by Rhian, Wednesday, 26 November 2014 4:07:09 PM
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'Morning Barry,

So glad you mentioned the EU. How is social destruction going over there? Sometimes the consequences of left wing stupidity just can't be fixed.

Your article almost gloats at the lack of options available to nations that followed the weak border polices. I guess the 1200 or so boat people who tragically drowned trying to get to Australia are just collateral damage to progressives.

Shame on you, or has hypocrisy replaced shame.
Posted by spindoc, Wednesday, 26 November 2014 4:21:06 PM
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A while back, Saudi Arabia deported some woman back to Somalia. People were outraged: "How could you do such a thing!", they said, "Don't you know Somali is dangerous?"

The Saudis replied: "Somalia is dangerous because it is full of Somalis."

Remember when everyone thought it would be a great idea to import eastern europeans to work on the Snowy Mountains scheme? Remember the death toll? You want to know what caused it? We accepted immigrants from Serbia and Croatia, and the wogs were outright murdering each other. God help a Serb on his own on top of a dam when a pack of Croats rounded the corner - and vice-versa.

It's not about race. It's about culture. And language. You cannot take a man from war-torn or tribal areas, drop him into a modern, peaceful, industrialised nation with a language he does not know, and expect him to behave like a law-abiding citizen.

But this situation is ideal for multinationals. Take cheap labour from X, import them to a place with good infrastructure, and the people who live there will bend over backwards to help you keep the X'es in a secure compound. Slaves, effectively. Amoral moneymaking interests all around the world salivate at the phrase "open borders".
Posted by PaulMurrayCbr, Wednesday, 26 November 2014 4:24:55 PM
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spindoc, no-one drowns if the borders are open. Think about it. Even Clive Palmer got that one right.
Posted by byork, Wednesday, 26 November 2014 4:25:55 PM
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This graph from the Global Footprint Network shows the problem with Barry York's open borders. It plots environmental footprint (consumption) vs. rank on the UN Human Development index (human well-being) for all the different countries.

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/blog/human_development_and_the_ecological_footprint

All of the countries on the UN's very high human development list have their average consumption well above what would be sustainable if all 7 billion of us (going on 10-11 billion) did it. If we opened our borders people would flood in until conditions here were just as bad as they are in their home countries, with all the effects on the environment that you might expect.

We are getting massively high immigration, not because it is good for us, but because our elite and their puppet politicians benefit from the distributional effects. More people mean bigger domestic markets, easy profits from real estate (and from lending the money to buy the houses), and a cheap, compliant work force due to an oversupplied labour market and migrants (often temporary) who are under the thumb of their employers. The Democrats in the US and the Labor parties here and in the UK also benefit from importing people who are more likely to vote for them. Obama is electing a new people.

Rhian says

<For free-marketeers like me the answer is easy – let people come as long as they support themselves. But for Lefties like Barrie this is a dilemma – people will either welcome poor migrants, or be generous to them, but not both.>

But what if the migrants are supporting themselves at the expense of the existing population by a race to the bottom on the labour market? See the 2008 House of Lords report

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200708/ldselect/ldeconaf/82/82.pdf

Rhian, say, benefits from the low wages and high rents, but the costs of the extra infrastructure and the welfare costs for the people who are now in precarious employment and need their wages supplemented to get by are shared with everyone else in the community.

A lot of us have objected to the Trans-Tasman agreement because of the extra numbers.
Posted by Divergence, Wednesday, 26 November 2014 5:05:02 PM
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Byork,
Palmer United's refugee policy is even stricter than the coalition's, they propose a system where the asylum seeker needs a valid passport and ID documentation and legitimate documents from the country in which he embarked the flight to Australia. If the asylum seeker fails to satisfy the immigration requirements he's to be detained at the airport and put straight back on the next flight to his point of departure.
Posted by Jay Of Melbourne, Wednesday, 26 November 2014 6:06:36 PM
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I think Mr Obama is targeting people already in the country, holding down two or three jobs and paying tax, repeat, paying tax, and for their social security tax stamps.
These people have invariably been there and tolerated for decades; are sending their kids to school and behaving like any other law abiding citizens/ethnic community.

Another question that needs to be answered is.
Why aren't the old Spanish land titles, which predates modern America, regarded as just or more legal than those handed to those who forced them off their land claims?

Spanish is spoken by around 40% of Americans, and far too big a demographic to ignore, exploit or abuse!

The predictable republican reaction, is just handing the next congress/senate election to the democrats!
Rhrosty.
Posted by Rhrosty, Wednesday, 26 November 2014 6:20:25 PM
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Divergence

Apologies, I should have said “ALMOST none of the anti-immigration spruikers we hear in Australia objects to the free movement of New Zealanders into Australia.” There were bound to be a few.

The study you linked to finds that immigration benefits the UK, though the effect is small. This more recent one finds a bigger benefit from EU immigration.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/nov/05/eu-migrants-uk-gains-20bn-ucl-study

Most of the objective and rigorous studies I have seen show a small but positive welfare effect for pre-existing populations from migration.
Posted by Rhian, Wednesday, 26 November 2014 7:34:04 PM
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Rhrosty,

The old Spanish land titles were recognized by the US in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, although in many cases the Mexicans were cheated of their rights by corrupt local courts. The people themselves were given the choice of becoming American citizens with full voting rights, provided that they took up citizenship within a year. These lands were very sparsely populated at the time.

A lot of US citizens of Hispanic descent are not overjoyed with illegal immigration because it depresses wages and denies their children entry level jobs.(Do a search on "Los Angeles janitors illegal immigrants".) In fact, I recall reading that some anti-immigration politicians in Arizona could not have been elected without Hispanic votes.

The problem is that the American politicians have been refusing to enforce the immigration laws on the books at the instigation of their corporate backers. In order to work in the US, illegal aliens have to commit crimes such as identity theft (which Obama is not going to pursue).

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/22562690/ns/technology_and_science-security/t/illegal-immigrants-turn-identity-theft/#.VHWhHWdxnrw

Low-skilled immigrants, especially illegal ones, earn low wages and thus pay very little tax. They impose fiscal costs for their health care, the education of their children, etc. that make them a net loss to the public as a whole. Far better if those jobs went to unemployed Americans, who are otherwise drawing welfare benefits, with somewhat better pay and conditions.

I have some sympathy for people who were brought to the US as small children and know no other country, but very little for their parents. The main concern is not the people who are already in the US, however, but the flood of new illegal immigrants that are likely to be attracted by the amnesty. Remember that employers often want them because they are illegal and have no rights to legal wages and safe working conditions.

Obama is electing a new people.
Posted by Divergence, Wednesday, 26 November 2014 8:11:43 PM
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Rhian,

Don't just read the executive summary of the House of Lords Report. The very small per capita benefit masks some real harm to some very vulnerable people. For example

"72. Most of our witnesses agreed that there is some negative effect of immigration on the wages of low-skilled workers. However, there were disagreements over the extent of the effects and the amount of evidence. Professor Blanchflower said there was “some evidence” to suggest that A8 workers have lowered wage increases amongst the least skilled “but the effects are not enormous” (Q 318). The Institute of Directors argued that the effect on wage growth has “probably been limited”.39 The City of London Corporation was the most pessimistic about the impact on the low-paid. It concluded that the concentration of immigrants in low-paid jobs in the capital had led to “significant downward pressure on wages at the bottom end of the market”. While this had encouraged growth in the number of these jobs, earnings among workers in this sector ended up “falling behind growth in the cost of living” (p 427). Professor Nickell suggested that homecare staff and cleaners were among those whose pay was adversely affected by immigration (Q 37).

"73. Even if immigrants are not competing directly for the same jobs in many cases, they may still have a strong indirect effect in depressing wages for resident workers.Professor Blanchflower found that wage growth slowed in both the UK and Ireland following A8 accession although both economies were booming. He attributed this to a rise in the fear of unemployment caused by high immigration, which in turn leads to lower wage settlements (p 196)."

"93. Our recent report on apprenticeship and skills argued that the Government was not doing enough to develop high quality apprenticeships.46 Although the evidence is limited, there is a clear danger that immigration has some adverse impact on training opportunities and apprenticeships offered to British workers."
Posted by Divergence, Wednesday, 26 November 2014 8:32:45 PM
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'morning byork,

Sorry I missed your post. Perhaps because it's inellectual content was even lower than the number of words.

You say; << spindoc, no-one drowns if the borders are open.>>

I say ; << byork, no-one drowns now the borders are closed >>

It's called critical thinking
Posted by spindoc, Friday, 28 November 2014 10:18:37 AM
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spindoc, every single drowning occurred because desperate people hired unscrupulous people smugglers who benefited from successive Australian governments' restrictive refugee policies. Clive Palmer once remarked that we should fly them in, and he actually made sense on that. For a significant financial cost, the Coalition government is successfully stopping the flow but is also responsible for great inhumanity to these people who end up trapped in appalling conditions elsewhere rather than being given the opportunity to a better life, and the prospect of making a contribution, here.
Posted by byork, Saturday, 29 November 2014 5:09:56 AM
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Desperate my foot byork. The only thing they are desperate for is to rip off our welfare. That's why 85% are still on welfare 5 years after arrival.

They are obviously fleeing for their lives, when as soon as they have residency, they are back off home to get a wife or two, to add to our welfare bill,

I wish you people would get real. Blathering the same garbage year after year gets very boring to listen to.
Posted by Hasbeen, Saturday, 29 November 2014 6:58:49 AM
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