Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

Are you guys willfully misreading Sanpaku? People here on H1-B Visas are not Americans and would not refer to themselves as Americans, any moreso than a person here on a student visa.

Moreover, Sanpaku only referred to "Americans" in connection with the clause of his sentence about "free trade," i.e. forcing Americans to compete with people in other countries.

I guess to be fair he said "legal immigration including..." so maybe I misread lol

Want better conditions for labor? Make it scarce compared to capital

i'd like to gently suggest that this is a nonsense in the context of capitalist market economics

Anyway, I think his larger point stands irrespective of semantics. My take on it is that the problem comes not from "immigration" per se, but from the use of immigration to force an unlevel playing field and reduce wages. H-1B visas are nothing other than that.

every reference to immigration as being bad because it distorts the labour market relies on ignoring the point that capitalism depends on distorting the labour market, by whatever means available

however you word it, it's fascist propaganda

that's silly

Was Marx a fascist?

Groucho or Harpo?

is it? or is the notion of a national labour market in a massively globalized economy where the proletariat doesn't even belong to the nation that provides the majority of a nation's commodities silly?

i can comfortably agree with a lot of Marx's thought and recognise that he was analyzing societies that were radically different to today's societies.

i can also watch striking workers complain about immigrant labour on tv while dressed head to toe in clothes manufactured outside their own nation

Marx didn't give much of one fuck about the Nation State

Let me know when you crack the problem of organizing labor on a global scale. Until then we're stuck with the nation state.

that's a different question, but socialism is international or it's meaningless. immigration isn't a cause of low wages any more than population growth is.

or perhaps more relevantly, any more than industrialisation or mechanisation is.

Also, Sanpaku's whole point was to recognize the ways in which these forces have impacted the standard of living of Americans and that that in turn gave Trump an issue to seize. I don't think the answer to that is to deafly say "actually immigration is good," it's to concretely show Americans how their standards of living can be improved without making enemies out of immigrants. One of those ways would actually be MORE legal immigration, but on a level playing field and one that makes citizenship easier to attain rather than a dual-track guest worker type system.

acknowleding legitimate concerns about immigration has never been a force for good

i think part of the problem is that the genuine arguments in favor of immigration get hijacked by neoliberal think tank types who really do just want to use immigration to push down wages. The way that is done is by creating a class of immigrants that doesn't have full rights and is scared to organize or fight back because, among other things, they might be deported. That's what has actually happened over the past few decades.

Actually immigration is good and Sanpaku is a fascist

i'm happy to accept Sanpaku isn't a fascist if they say so, they're just repeating fascist tropes in this instance

immigration isn't good or bad

silby had Sanpaku’s number the first time tbh

yall i knew sanpaku was full of shit years agin, just saying

ago, agin and agin

agog

his demos were better

you guys are being ridiculous. You're saying "repeating fascist tropes" as if saying anything that has tinges of something fascists also say is equivalent to uttering a spell that conjures up fascism.

i'm saying that talking about immigration as problematic outside of any concept of capitalist exploitation is using the language of the far right. i specifically quoted this

Want better conditions for labor? Make it scarce compared to capital

sanpaku specifically referred to legal immigration in general so we can talk about temporary foreign worker visas til the cows come home but he's talking about immigration as per se a bad thing for Americans (not including those pesky immigrant Americans naturally)

as to the economic arguments. one country pursuing protectionism while the global economy is defined by free trade is a non-starter for obvious reasons. and as to restriction of immigration as an economic panacea: I guess we could look to Japan, a famously low immigration society, their economy has only been stagnating since ... 1990

and this is still predicated on some notion that a nation's labour is somehow intended to supply the needs of that nation itself? when has that ever been true?

lol @ taking the idea of a "global economy defined by free trade" at face value

also lol @ turning this into a strawman about "restriction of immigration as an economic panacea"

do u believe in LOLs

xp

can't see anybody doing that, can see a couple of people using the idea of immigration as neoliberal tool for wage control

lol @ taking the idea of a "global economy defined by free trade" at face value

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Monday, December 14, 2020 3:08 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

also lol @ turning this into a strawman about "restriction of immigration as an economic panacea"

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Monday, December 14, 2020 3:08 PM (twenty-five seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

how about fuck off

man alive showing his arse on yet another thread about how nefarious foreigns hurt the indigenous people is it? Well I fucking never.

how nefarious foreigns hurt the indigenous people

Feeling very proud of my immigrant powers rn.

I guess we could look to Japan, a famously low immigration society, their economy has only been stagnating since ... 1990

Worth it to maintain a pure ecosystem, amirite?

Kind of struggling to see where gyac got "nefarious foreigns" from MORE legal immigration, but on a level playing field and one that makes citizenship easier to attain rather than a dual-track guest worker type system.

probably your defending of Sanpaku and then laughing at people who’ve explained upthread why the points being raised are so concerning, happy to help

the fact that it's become a liberal (in the left-liberal sense) thing to tout "a global economy defined by free trade" is deserving of ridicule and scorn. It's exactly what's wrong with Democrats today.

I really like Pete Buttigieg and think his rise in politics is a happy development, I'm not even sure that's a conservative belief but it's definitely uncool

xp I was referring to the human cost of that kind of rhetoric, as mentioned by Jim.

I really like Pete Buttigieg and think his rise in politics is a happy development, I'm not even sure that's a conservative belief but it's definitely uncool

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Wednesday, December 16, 2020 12:13 PM (twenty-one minutes ago

mckinsey needs representation on the national stage, agreed

I really like Pete Buttigieg and think his rise in politics is a happy development,

Happy for who? His AI?

lol this was never gonna be THAT safe a space

the fact that it's become a liberal (in the left-liberal sense) thing to tout "a global economy defined by free trade" is deserving of ridicule and scorn. It's exactly what's wrong with Democrats today.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Wednesday, December 16, 2020 7:55 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

im not "touting it "and am not a liberal. the issue is that you can't opt out from existing in the global economy, so the stance of "just don't take part in trade deals like everyone else" doesn't really hold water for me. the Lexit argument in the uk, which didn't have many adherents, was of this ilk. the argument goes something like"

opt out of the crony capitalist organization the EU
??????
socialism in the UK and better pay and standards of living for workers

i don’t have strong feelings about pete either way but the ire towards him on twitter is so overblown it makes me want to contraristan

non-service dogs should never be allowed in any business ever*

*pet grooming, veterinarian clinics etc excepted

i wanna weigh in on Sankaku man alive vs jim immigration debate but im submitting a paper tonight so it’ll have to wait a day or 2 but tl;dr jim is correct (although imo it’s way out of line to call them fascists). there’s actually virtually no evidence that immigration pushes down wages. it’s depressingly ironic to me that hurting and sampaku are using the same simplistic “demand and supply” arguments that i bang my head against the wall at conservative labor economists for using. however as per usual u are all way too up your own asses with the “no you’re the neoliberal” “actually we should abolish the nation state and have a
global communist order” “and yet you live within a nation state” circular oneupmanship to understand anything