Don't believe the anti-immigrant claptrap. Migrants are no threat to us

[T_i_B]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1990573,00.html

Migrants from poor countries working in rich ones send home much more - $200bn a year officially, perhaps another $400bn informally - than the miserly $80bn western governments give in aid. These remittances go straight into local people's pockets, paying for food, clean water and medicines, enabling children to stay in school, and benefiting the local economy. Just as EU trade barriers that prevent African farmers selling the fruits of their labour in Britain are unfair, so are immigration controls that stop Africans selling their labour here.

Immigrants also make native workers more productive: nurses from the Philippines allow doctors to provide more patients with better care. They also add diversity and dynamism, stimulating innovation and enterprise, and thus economic growth: witness the buzz of a cosmopolitan city such as London. Innovation most often comes from groups of talented people sparking off each other. If they have different perspectives they can solve problems better. Look at Silicon Valley: Intel, Yahoo!, Google and eBay were all founded by migrants.

Undeniably, learning to live together can be tough. Yet closing our borders would not reduce the terrorist threat from a tiny home-grown minority, while anti-immigrant rhetoric fuels hatred towards existing ethnic minorities. While concern about entrenched segregation is understandable, the real issue is not multiculturalism, but social exclusion. Nobody is terrified of rich whites clustering in Chelsea.

As for shared values, society is broad enough to accommodate nuns and transsexuals, Marxists and libertarians, eco-warriors and city slickers - but we must all abide by parliamentary democracy constrained by fundamental principles such as freedom within the law, equality before the law and tolerance of differences. And while we fall well short of the lofty ideals of liberal democracy - discrimination is rife, tolerance limited - they are still the standards we aspire to and the basis of our peaceful coexistence.

[Deep13]

1. 300 million

That's 3X the size of the of the population in 1900. How long can population growth continue? How can we protect the environment and sustainability when more and more farmland and wild acerage is turned into suburban sprawl every year? Right now, there is close to zero population growth among native-born Americans. The increases are mostly due to immigration, legal and otherwise.

We Americans have always taken the cheap and easy way out when it comes to providing for our needs. Instead of learning to live within our means and to distribute wealth in some equitable manner, we simply use more resources, more land, more chemicals, more polution, more exploitation and more cheap labor. Instead of investing in education to train nurses or techical workers, we import tham from India and other places. Instead of paying Americans a decent wage to do difficult but necessary jobs, we import Mexicans and others to do it. This keeps prices down for the middle class and allows the rich to continue to make obscene profits. Of course, all these new people need to be fed, clothed, housed and transported. That means we need to use more resources and import more labor to sustain them.

This cannot continue forever.

[Cleita]

2. I think you answered your own question here.

We Americans have always taken the cheap and easy way out when it comes to providing for our needs. Instead of learning to live within our means and to distribute wealth in some equitable manner, we simply use more resources, more land, more chemicals, more polution, more exploitation and more cheap labor.

Especially the "more cheap labor" part. If employers were forced to pay any labor whether legal or illegal the same living wage and benefits, you would find that the labor market for cheap labor would slow down considerably and therefore there would be fewer immigrants. Instead we want to build a wall. What a waste of resources.

[Cleita]

3. Of course this is about England, a country immensely smaller

than our, but the writer is on the right track as to how immigrants should be viewed, not as the enemy but for what they contribute in the long run.

[fasttense]

4. The immigrant is not the problem, it is the employer who

thinks he/she have a right to cheap, cheap, labor. Open borders lead to high unemployment. If you don't believe me just check out Iraq. With absolutely open borders, established by CPA, Iraq has a 67% unemployment rate.

Open borders only work when everyone is competing on an equal footing. Countries must first establish fair wages and work environments for all their labor, until that is done, the middle classes will lose when competing with sweat shop and prison labor.

[struggle4progress]

5. The problem you describe is the mobility of capital, not the mobility of people:

NAFTA and other such agreements allow the corporate class to exploit cheap labor wherever they can find it, by relocating manufacturing facilities in areas where labor is unprotected by law and may actually be subject to military-style oppression -- and to leave if labor organizes in its own defense.

Why should we allow capital to move more easily than workers?

[Dover]

6. Another hot-button issue hyped to divide, distract and supply lucrative contracts

not to mention take attention away from the fact that the real job loss in theis country is due to sending them abroad.

[LeftishBrit]

7. Great points!

Unfortunately, in "The Guardian" this is largely preaching to the converted. If only some of this information could be put in the right-wing tabloids; alas, the selling of hate is too profitable for them to allow themselves and their readers to be interrupted with the facts.

[T_i_B]

8. Well as it happens,

The author, Phillipe Legrain has a book out at present titled Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them so these arguments are available in your local Waterstones.

I brought Legrain's previous book, Open World: The Truth About Globalization and that's pretty good as well.