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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
Well you see, they are coming here to steal all our jobs but they are also jobless losers stealing all our welfare
Reagan was an evil genius with the "welfare queen" branding.
Hateful branding is always easier than inclusive branding. Just think about how many different words Americans have historically used for black people: all "they" have to do to turn a positive term into a slur is to say it with a sneer.
These are the same people who were simultaneously protesting "Stop the count" and "count the votes" on election day in 2020.
Alas. Will no one spare one word of prayer for the cats and the dogs of the people that live there that the immigrants are also eating
Racism
Brace yourself for the mask-wearing lemmyites who are going to say "that's too reductive! There are very real issues with how brown people over there have different and incompatible cultuuuures, we can't just let annnnyone in, what will happen if they all rush in and replaaaaace us?"
I've been fucking dealing with weird lemmy nazis for days, someone must have left out a piece of meat so they started spawning.
I just adore when they talk about how other cultures have things like child-marriage as examples of what we need to protect ourselves from. Like the west is some shining beacon of taking good care of our most vulnerable people.
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.
I mean fuck them and everything truly, but is this really such a paradox? It’s not like both can’t be true: say the men get jobs and the women and children get welfare. Or some immigrants take jobs and some are lazy and don’t. You can even get welfare while working if you are poor enough.
I’m just saying - trying to fight this mindset by calling it an impossible paradox will not work because that doesn’t even make basic sense. I know you’re only parroting what’s been said in a million tweets, so I’m not blaming you for inventing this idea. Just maybe stop repeating it like it’s a super clever gotcha. It isn’t.
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.
You can't think of a single thing an immigrant has made worse?
Then you must not heard of Elon Musk.
Racism.
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.
The explanation is racism.
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.
Theoretically. But. Not really true.
We know who devalues labor. It's the companies that only pay the bare minimum wage cause it's the law. Otherwise they wouldn't.
It's the companies that pay under the table to desperate people so they can avoid paying them the legal amount and often commit wage theft and there is nothing undocumented people can do about it.
Exploitative businesses are the ones devaluing labor.
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.
60% lower chance of committing crimes. It's been studied so many times in so many countries now.
Also, there's been many examples of when large groups of migrants enter a community, there's a short period of a year or two where there is an increase in crime, but it's usually against the immigrants, and in the cases where immigrants are committing crimes or disturbing the peace, it's almost always related to communities not having their basic needs met like services and access, and it always balances out within a year or two as the groups integrate.
I had to study a lot of this, the amount of disinformation out there that people willfully ignore or avoid even looking at is astounding, our species is deeply, deeply scared of changes and people different than ourselves.
It turns out, with a lot of scientific research behind it, that when you push people into the same spaces and force them to mingle, they become far less racist and xenophobic and usually form stronger communities, it just takes a little acclimation time.
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's also the fact that whether or not the undocumented are illegally voting in national elections, states currently receive representation in Congress based on their total population, not citizen population. Which is a strong motivator for blue sanctuary states and cities to want open borders, and for conservatives to push for legal deportations. This is a power struggle.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
Bigotry.
Plain and simple.
They hate LGBTQ+ people despite their lives being in no way affected by them whatsoever. Most of them have probably never even directly interfaced with one.
Same thing for immigrants.
The American conservative movement is a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic movement.
It's a bigot cult.
I agree with the post but it conveniently avoids the actual issue. They are blamed for:
I’m not saying that they do affect these negatively, but that these two subjects are making life harder for regular people. So when someone sees something like “immigrants don’t affect me”, they just assume the poster is rich enough not to be squeezed like the rest of us.
Capitalism gotta have its scapegoats or else it won’t work.