this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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The one that wants to provide universal basic income based on a wealth tax.
I know this is a meme but i fundamentally disagree with what lots of other people call "left politics". I'm against immigration (for purely economic, not for racist reasons!), and i think that "men are the root of all evil" is a false and meaningless statement. It creates unnecessary tension within society and in my opinion provokes a civil war. It's literally that meme:
I really hope you are being sarcastic here.
I am not anti-immigration because I prioritize social factors in my country's situation, but that is a real position that people make valid arguments for.
Immigration is a real economic factor used by the owning class to lower wages. It exploits both local and immigrant workers. Look at Trump voters complaining in the news about how anti-immigration has ruined their workforce - they were exploiting immigrants to save money instead of paying local workers a (...relatively) reasonable wage.
Except this is not true. Immigration does not depress wages. It boosts the economy.
What do you mean by boosting 'the economy'? GDP (PPP) per capita? Median wages? Labor productivity? A nebulous all-encompasing concept of a country's production, distribution and trade? It's not a meaningful term on its own, it's usually just a rhetorical trick in mass media to make it sound like shareholders making more money is somehow good for the country.
I was not talking about the abstract grand scheme of things, like benefits from their diverse experiences and overall population benefits, I'm talking about the direct immediate effects on worker wages. Due to social circumstances, companies can, and often do, save wage costs by replacing local labor with immigrant labor they can underpay, and with the special case of illegal immigrants, even pay illegally small amounts. Immigration increases the reserve army of labor that compete for lower wages. This is happening in my workplace, actually, not with immigration but with outsourcing, the human resources department are replacing trained capable local workers with undertrained workers in countries with lower labor costs and regulations (e.g. India) purely to cut wage costs. But the principle is the same, outsourcing like this only applies to work capable of being done remotely (e.g. call centers, graphic design, tech work), for manual labor then immigration has a similar benefit to a business owner.
Once again, I'm not talking about whether immigration is beneficial, (and like I said, I believe it is) I'm talking about how immigration is used by the owning class to reduce wages and enrich themselves.
No, i'm sick of being lied to.
I'm not a nationalist in the sense that i think my country's any better than any other country.
But I do comprehend the significance of borders. Imagine people had no skin. They couldn't survive. When you go to a restaurant and ask for a glass of apple juice, you wouldn't expect a server of another restaurant to give it to you. Because one server is associated to one restaurant, and not to the other restaurant.
That has exactly nothing to do with thinking you're superior. It's just a concept to help organize the world. I hope i've made my point clear enough.
You don't think people should ever move to a different country than the one they were born in? Sounds like a boring world. If your county is a monoculture then there will definitely be xenophobia and racism.
Why do you feel that is a good thing worth preserving? That's one of the worst aspects of wage labor.
How else would you have it? Every server serves at every restaurant? There are no restaurants? Restaurants are all self-service? In the latter case, what's the difference to a kitchen?
It's not about which way I'd rather have it (Though that's a worthwhile conversation of it's own), it's that the analogy doesn't work because wage labor is immisterating and not something most wage laborers themselves would want to uphold in their ideal society. That is to say, your analogy doesn't support your argument for borders. And yes I know you said immigration and not borders, but immigration isn't a thing without border.
This isn't even complex Bistromathics my friend and people like you have already tried to foot the bill for hateful people far to many times for this ideology not to be a dead end composed of us resisting you.
You lost some of us at the presumption of restaurants and servers.
Maybe imagine no countries (nothing to kill or die for, etc. etc.)
Presume that everyone is a person and has all the rights you do.
apart from the issue with borders. states also serve a second purpose:
the state is the only thing that restricts company's powers and protects the people from companies. at least that's how it works in every sane country (which includes the US). how do you avoid company-towns if there's no state? do the physical violence yourself and threaten companies to treat the people not completely shitty? would you really do that?
Actual democracy and collective decision making solves that