The point on p. 39 about immigration is important for everyone to understand:
> Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.
According to an Economist article addressing data collected by Denmark, each non-western immigrants produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes, and immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, are a net cost on the government at every age: https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-...
Progressive taxation will generally mean that anyone under the median income has a negative net impact on the government's finances. All this study is doing is reflecting the obvious fact that immigrants are by and large working class.
Yes, but the economic rationale of immigration is to have younger workers who can pay into the system to buffer the growing older population. That can’t happen if the immigrants never pay in more than they take out at any point in their life.
> Yes, but the economic rationale of immigration is to have younger workers who can pay into the system to buffer the growing older population
Is it though? Not passing judgement either way, but the most common economic rationale for immigration generally seems to be that it's a source of cheap labor.
> That can’t happen if the immigrants never pay in more than they take out at any point in their life.
If the surplus economic value created by immigrants who are employed is generally not returned to them in the form of high wages, then yeah, they're not going to be paying it to the government as taxes.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that a lot of people in this thread seem to be conflating per-person net economic benefit and net tax payments. The first can be significantly positive while the second is negative.
> Is it though? Not passing judgement either way, but the most common economic rationale for immigration generally seems to be that it's a source of cheap labor.
If you have cheap labor who draw more in public services than they pay in taxes, then you're using tax dollars to effectively subsidize private profits. Maybe that's the unstated rationale, but few proponents of immigration would say that out loud.
> using tax dollars to effectively subsidize private profits.
Yeah thats the entire point lmao.
there are many indirect effects. Imagine a factory employing 80 low-wage "takers" (line workers etc) and 20 high-wage "makers" (managers etc). The owners of the factory make $1 million in profit every month as a taxable dividend. Well if you get rid of the line workers: no more factory, no more managers, no more dividend. This is why honest analyses go beyond simple tax balance accounting.
The other big impact is on price level. When you have an inverted population pyramid, fewer workers need to support more retirees and this shows up as inflation concentrated in labor-intensive industries like healthcare. So even if a program like Medicare really had more tax receipts per beneficiary after reducing immigration, it would also be spending much more per beneficiary under a labor shortage.
> each non-western immigrants produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes
I'm not familiar with the writer but their definition of "non-western" is a bit weird to me. I don't know what criteria were used or whether these are Denmark's classifications or the author's own.
The chart captioned "Violent crime conviction rates for immigrants in 2010–2021 by nation of origin expressed in multiples of the Danish conviction rate" says, for example, that Greece is Western but its neighbor North Macedonia is "other". Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania - all Western, but Czechoslovakia is "other". Croatia? Western, but curiously not Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, or Yugoslavia. There's no rhyme or reason here.
People originating from these debatably Western (or non-Western, I literally don't know but it's inconsistent either way) countries all have conviction rates above the Danish rate. Which would muddle the narrative of that particular chart a fair bit. Maybe it makes no difference to the fiscal question though.
Why are the demographics of a small Nordic nation something "everyone" should understand? Whenever I've pointed to how well the social safety nets work in these countries and how they could be an example for the US, I've been told that the US is too different of a country to draw an analogy.
Denmark has been the most systematic about collecting this sort of data about immigrants from different places. I suspect you’d see similar results in the UK and Canada if those governments collected the data. Canada’s GDP per capita has actually started declining recently.
I think Denmark’s welfare system is a model, so whoever you’re arguing with, it’s not me. I will point out that, if Denmark with its robust welfare system can’t integrate MENAPT immigrants effectively, that doesn’t bode well for other countries with less efficient welfare states.
Net cost to a national government and GDP per capita are not the same thing. Presumably these people become more productive by moving to more developed countries; that's the general reason that people immigrate to particular places. My impression without looking at the data is that US GDP per capita has continued to increase despite large (called a crisis by Republicans) numbers of immigrants during the Biden Administration. And given that these people are not citizens of the US, presumably they will not be eligible for all benefits granted to citizens which would decrease their cost to the government.
What is MENAPT here?
Middle East, northern africa, pakistan
…and Turkey, the T in MENAPT.
Over what timespan? This analysis isn't elaborated at all. Does it count the impact of companies being able to pay lower wages and paying more taxes? Does it account for the future generations? Etc.
It’s explained in the link. Figure 2.7. It covers immigrants and their descendants across all ages. Here’s further analysis of the same data: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/01/immigration-economics-f...
this "further analysis" is comically biased, misinformed, misapplied mush. It's honestly like a gish gallop to quote this shit. Well, I read it, so I'm going to take the time.
> produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes
This is an absolute lie, pulled from the trash. Maybe you just didn't understand it -- I hope!
Claiming that either the distribution of contributions across ages, or the "age adjusted average net contributions" graph portray some kind of a "long term" picture of what people's contributions over the next two generations would be is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the graph and data represent, or is capable of representing.
The first chart is simply a calculation of contribution in 2018 by age. The second is a remapping of 2018's immigrant population's 2018 contributions and costs from their then-age distribution to proportions equivalent to the then danish-native age distribution. It has nothing to do with either populations' prospective future contributions. It's just a convolution of data which is presently skewed by extreme circumstance, i.e. being an active asylum seeker by definition means you are recently economically unstable, and far more likely to be a member of specific age demographics. It is not a projection of any likely future; it is solely a lens to remove one confounding factor -- the very different age distributions of the instantaneous populations compared -- for the purpose of comparing their 2018 contributions directly.
And then it goes off into justifying its conclusions by comparing "countries by IQ"?! Pure hack slop, and nothing else. There's references to coronavirus lies, and this being "an immigrant invasion" -- this is not remotely convincing nor unbiased, nor even an interesting analysis. It is just kinda long and filled with errors. Like I said: bit of a gish gallop.
To draw from it, and parrot its erroneous claims like they should convince us as they convinced you, the disinterested and enlightened scientist, is a new nadir on your dismal intellectual track record.
Intuitvely, those opposing immigration have always known this. But tell that t someone from the left They will verbally kill you for stating obvious facts.
The left vs right theatre is really just two sides of the same coin. By now every western democracy is being dragged along the same path with different stages of progression.
1. Move domestic production and jobs to lesser developed countries to increase profits.
2. Open the gates for mass immigration under the guise of openness and empathy to import wage slaves for the service sector and use every media channel to ostracize anyone who utters the slightest doubt about this policy.
3. Aggressively push DEI and gender ideology to alienate the social-democratic left from the academic left and drown out any other popular left topics like worker's rights or class warfare.
4. Amplify polarization on social media by creating as many conflicts as possible (left vs right, old vs young, men vs women, natives vs immigrants, ...).
5. Promote a right-wing populist party and trick enough people into voting for it.
6. Move the tax burden from the rich to the middle and lower class and remove regulations and restrictions on companies while ignoring all the other problems.
7. Establish surveillance and authoritarian rule under the guise of safety.
Everyone in this so-called culture war is being played, so maybe it's time to stop being smug about being smarter than the other side and start contemplating if there is any common idea that we can agree on that allows us to go forward.
> any common idea that we can agree on
I'm afraid there is no common ground anymore.
There is nothing "smug" about having an opinion. And there are no compromises in sight.
However, while 2020 helped a lot to escalate the situation, I also feel like politics were always pretty hopeless. Its just that if you grow older, you learn more about what is going on, so things seem increasingly bleek.
Having an opinion is totally fine, of course. I meant that "I told you so" is a bit like pouring gasoline on a fire and doesn't really help the situation.
I agree that politics were always hopeless. We don't really have a mechanism to preserve political experiences, so every couple generations we repeat the same stupid mistakes.
Intuition alone really isn't to be trusted with public policy decisions of this magnitude.
I agree, but shouldn’t the burden be on the people advocating mass immigration to prove it helps?
No, because freedom of movement and commerce (specifically, selling one's labor) are human rights. No right is absolute, but the burden of proof is on the person claiming the consequences of exercising these rights are severe enough that they need to be abrogated.
There is no “human right” to cross national borders. It’s the opposite. International law recognizes both the collective right of “peoples”—groups of people—to form nations, and the right of nations to their territorial integrity.
> the burden of proof is on the person claiming the consequences of exercising these rights are severe enough that they need to be abrogated.
Every country on earth claims this.
If what you write were true, there wouldn't be any borders on this planet. However, there are. The right to free movement is simply not true. If you want that to be true, advocate for the removal of all borders worldwide.
Well, "data" can't be trusted either, because it is released/announced very selectively. And the media doesn't help either, because data which contradicts the chosen narrative isn't published/commented. In general, I am missing independent journalism. Most of what we get these days is agenda-driven.
Denmark has shown a rather pronounced distaste for integrating people into the workforce whose names signify non European origins.
In contrast to Sweden, which decided to simply stop collecting data on certain things whenever a given statistic began to become inconvenient with respect to asylum and immigration policies.
You realize different kinds of immigrants go to different places? Do you think that immigrants from Bangladesh are a net cost at every country they go to including Pakistan?