Man, the 20th Century was a mess!

Britain and France were eager to carve up the rotting Ottoman Empire for the oil treasure under the territory. Fine, but the slices they made through the Middle East did not take account of all the various ethnic/religious divisions there. (Colonial powers did the same thing in Africa.). As if there wasn't enough turmoil already, the Zionist movement pleaded for a Jewish Homeland in Palestine, aka, Israel. Zionism, of course, wasn't hatched in a vacuum. Jews had been repeatedly subjected to pogroms across Europe. They wanted a refuge of safety. Than the Balfour Agreement.

Was Britain the greater or lesser villain for limiting Jewish Immigration to Palestine during the Holocaust in Germany?

After WWII, Britain washed its hands of the problem and in 1948 the State of Israel created itself -- what the Arabs call the Nakba. The state of Israel meant the dispossession of the Palestinians. Further bad acts have been carried out by all concerned in the last 75 years.

Europe's distaste for the "The wretched refuse of your teeming shores" landing on Lampadusa, the Azores, Greece, and various other places seems quite understandable to me. I don't have any enthusiasm for the millions of migrants heading toward our southern border. I'm a leftist quite out of step with a lot of leftists on this issue. My view is that sovereign nations have the right and responsibility to maintain their borders and follow a rational policy on admission. Just because x-millions of South Americans or Africans (and people from elsewhere) want to come to the US or EU doesn't mean they must be welcomed or admitted at all.

If they can't get in, too bad, but I readily recognize that many of these people are trying to get away from economic, political, and social adversity, some of which we can trace back to our own policies. I'm on Israel's side, but I also recognize that Palestinians got the royal shaft. Unfortunately, consistency is just not going to be possible in resolving all (any?) of the wrongs.

My view is that sovereign nations have the right and responsibility to maintain their borders and follow a rational policy on admission. Just because x-millions of South Americans or Africans (and people from elsewhere) want to come to the US or EU doesn't mean they must be welcomed or admitted at all. — BC

I couldn't have said it better, BC. I fully agree with all you posted. I imagine that the U.S. has a big issue regarding the admission of uncontrolled immigration. Well, the same here, but in a smaller land with a weaker economy. Spain has received immigration in Canary Islands recently, and our government decided to 'share' the responsibility of taking care of them amongst the rest of the regions on the peninsula. Some of these regions have serious problems of unemployment and then new people who don't know the language appear and want to live and work as well. It is obvious that a conflict of coexistence is coming...

As you well said, better regulation of the borders is an act of responsibility and not racism or xenophobia towards others.

Refreshing honesty with which I can't help but agree, BC. The tragic legacy of centuries of Eurasia's "Great Game" is today's realpolitik world "governed", at best, by lifeboat ethics "regulated" by gunboat diplomacy. Climate change – ongoing legacy of Eurasian industrialization – is only accelerating these crises of economic migrations and war refugees. But how long, BC, can we national security neoliberal Haves keep out those teeming masses of global Have-nots? Apparently, without radically structural, 'progressive 'reforms' in the US, EU & the BRICS, in a couple of decades or sooner even many 'leftists' will be panicked enough to openly call for full militarization of national borders and the UNHRC be damned. :mask:

As for the OP – As a lifelong leftist, I'm pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli; also, anti-Hamas and anti-Likud (& ethnic cleansing, land-thieving settlers).

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/847621

As for the OP – As a lifelong leftist, I'm pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli (non-settler); also, anti-Hamas and anti-Likud (& land-thieving settlers). — 180 Proof

Same for me.

Sadly, America seems full of people who support Hamas so much they think Hamas murdering innocents is ethical, AND they also hate white Europeans for wanting a more balanced approach to immigration, without realising the tension between these two beliefs.

Interesting point. What about this difference: Israeli settlers are neither economic migrants nor refugees asking permission for asylum. They are colonists. Migrants and refugees seek permission (except those who don't i guess).

... they also hate white Europeans for wanting a more balanced approach to immigration ... — flannel jesus

Is that it? I thought we "hate" them for their nativist hatred of those "damn dirty darkies" (i.e. howling about "Eurarabia", etc).

case in point lol.

If you think what's happening to Palestinians is terrible, you should give at least some slack to Europeans who don't want the same thing to happen to them. Palestine is a strong historical precedent for what happens when a population is hit with unfettered immigration of a hostile culture.

If Palestine had instead been given the right to be "xenophobic and racist and keep out those desperate dirty Jews" - I've taken some liberties with your words there, hope you don't mind - the Palestinian situation would look very different today. In fact I would say that's the very problem: the Palestinians were not given the right to self determination. This flavour of leftist wants to take away Europeans right to self determination in the same way.

"settlers" meaning who exactly?

Israelis stealing land in the west bank? That's not who this post is talking about, it's not defending those settlers in any way.

The influx of Jews that populated Israel from the 20s to the 70s were in no small part refugees. At least some of these settlers, who we can all agree are in the wrong, are the descendants of those refugees.

The influx of Jews that populated Israel from the 20s to the 70s were in no small part refugees. — flannel jesus

Sure, but they didn't seek permission from palestinians did they? (I have no idea if they did or not). It sounds like the good ol' Brits handed out permission for them to settle in other people's land. Is that what happened? I'm not a historian. Neither the original refugees, their descendants, nor current colonisers seem overly embarrassed about it. Or perhaps those who were embarrassed moved out of Palestinian lands, leaving just those who felt entitled to stay. I love making up history. Fuck books.

The British should have invited everyone to Blighty. Build Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land, as it were.

You're absolutely right, they did seek permission but not from the native Palestinians, whose wishes were ignored.

Which is... sort of exactly my point. In Western countries right now, you have people who are saying "I don't think we should allow this unfettered immigration of Muslims, it doesn't seem like it's going well", and their wishes are also being ignored, and not just ignored but they're made out to be terrible racists for even thinking that there could be negative consequences for unfettered immigration of a hostile population.

Made out to be terrible racists by the same people who are now saying that Palestinians are completely the victims of this terrible situation and Jewish colonisers are to blame.

Now, go back to the 1920s and ask these same people, "Are the Palestinians who are saying they don't want more Jews to come into Palestine also racists? Are they racists just like the modern day Swedes are who don't want more Muslims to swarm into Sweden?"

Because... how is it different? How is a Swede saying he doesn't want more Muslims immigrants today different from a Palestinian who didn't want more Jewish immigrants in the 1920s/30s/40s?

The Swede is, arguably, racist, or at least immoral, or perhaps just ignorant (from a lefty perspective). Whereas a Palestinian who objects to illegal colonisation isn't. It may be that the Palesitian, in peace time, with no illegal colonisation, would be fine with Jewish immigrants, and welcome them, if they came lawfully, asked permission, and didn't terrorise the local neighbourhood. There's a huge difference. Are we talking at cross purposes? I hope I'm following you. I'm trying to do an assignment at the same time so I may have got in a muddle.

EDIT: So I guess I'm saying that the leftie wankers are actually being consistent in denouncing the Swede and being sympathetic to Palestinisans wanting the foreign Israeli invaders to fuck off back home.

nah, Palestinians wanted to cut off Jews right to immigrate to the region before it was ever describable as "illegal colonization". They were willing to live side by side with the Jews who were already there, but they absolutely didn't want more Jews coming in.

Palestinians wanted to cut off Jews right to immigrate to the region before it was ever describable as "illegal colonization". They were willing to live side by side with the Jews who were already there, but they absolutely didn't want more Jews coming in. — flannel jesus

Oh is that right? Oh well, in that case the Palestinians are racist bastards as well then, just like the rest of us.

I don't think one has to think of it like that, ESPECIALLY in retrospect, knowing what happened to them. They didn't want the Jews to come in, the UN opened the floodgates after ww2, and... the rest is history. With hindsight bias, you're saying they're racist but can you say they were wrong? They really did get the short end of the stick. They thought Jews would come in and ruin their way of life, and... turns out that's literally what happened.

Why shouldn't a nation want to keep it's national identity and protect it from large waves of immigrants hostile to that identity? I don't think it's fair to frame it as entirely racist at all. And hindsight tells us that if the "racists" in Palestine got their way, there'd potentially be a lot less bloodshed in the Levant today.

Why shouldn't a nation want to keep it's national identity and protect it from large waves of immigrants hostile to that identity? — flannel jesus

Well it can if it wants, I just don't like it I suppose. I don't really like national identities, except as objects of mockery. But I take your point that there is a valid analogy to be made, but it's obscured by the extremity of current circumstances.

I personally can put it quite simply: I don't want to live in a Muslim theocracy, and it seems many Muslims do. They oppose gay rights and even the right to freely criticise religion (theirs only, of course). I don't want the zeitgeist of my society to be drowned out by people with values like that, and it has nothing to do with the colour of their skin.

I agree with you on that. I think if that were a serious possibility I might fight to oppose it. But that's not an anti-immigration stance. That's an anti theocracy stance, which might, at some theoretical point in the future, entail a limited anti-immigration policy, if immigration was remotely likely to result in a theocracy. I'm not sure we're in serious disagreement.

I see, fair enough. In the case of the Palestinians, the influx of Jews did in fact have a massive effect on the politics of the region. I don't blame those Palestinians from centuries past from wanting to avoid that.

For a more straightforward example of this hypocrisy, one might consider outrage over "gentrification." There are, of course, very legitimate concerns over rising costs of living, rents, etc. However, sometimes arguments against gentrification are explicitly framed in terms of "cultural displacement," i.e. the idea that the dominant ethnic group in a neighborhood somehow gains a right to exclude other groups.

E.g., groups in LA have protested against new White and Asian arrivals from the Pacific Northwest, arguing that they needed to be somehow limited from certain neighborhoods because they were "colonizing" them by displacing the "Hispanic nature of the neighborhood."

This just seems completely unsupportable. First, in this context, the neighborhoods in questions themselves became Hispanic over the past generation or so, due to migration trends, the same phenomena in question. Second, you can't move to the United States and then complain about people from other states moving into your neighborhood, particularly on cultural grounds. That's the way the country works.

I certainly can see why people get upset about cultural displacement. Obviously, it can be saddening to see the culture of a neighborhood completely replaced over the course of 5-15 years. However, I don't see how one makes an argument that positive action to stop it is acceptable in some contexts but not others. It seems like the sort of thing people should learn to accept, to get over, rather than a phenomenon we attempt to stop. On a similar note, I can also understand why people get sad about churches closing, but that doesn't mean we have a right to force others to attend and donate to them.

You also see the same sort of hypocrisy in the argument that people from throughout Latin America somehow have a "greater right" to live within the borders of the US because they are descended from the native peoples of their home countries. I find this ridiculous. It would be like claiming that a Russian or a Romanian has a greater right to emigrate to the UK than an Algerian because they are "more European."

Even leaving aside the essentialism here, the peoples of Ecuador or Columbia don't have any close historical relation to the peoples of lands literally thousands of miles away. Parts of Latin America are even geographically further away from some parts of the United States than Europe or North Africa, and, historically, there is more documented contact between the northeast of Canada/the US and Europe/Africa than between the native peoples of that region and South America.

Thus, the idea seems to spring from a very essentialist conception of who are "colonizers" and who cannot be such. Also a conception of the "right to live in X place" grounded in little more apparently than skin tone.





This is made worse by claims in liberal media spaces (e.g., John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight") that economists essentially agree that immigration has net positive impacts for all of society, providing benefits without significant costs. This is simply not the real consensus in the field.

So, to 's point, there are sort of two things at work here. First, there is justified disapproval of nativist, racist sentiment. Second, there is the idea that it is "obvious" that immigration makes the host country better off. Given the second point, it becomes equally obvious that any opposition to immigration can only be motivated racism. After all, when the evidence in favor of immigration is so potent, what else could it be?

Of course, not all "leftists" conflate opposition to immigration with racism, but it certainly does seem to happen.

The problem is that it isn't at all clear that immigration benefits all developed host countries, nor that the benefits and costs of immigration are evenly distributed. Moreover, the case in favor of immigration is often made in fairly disingenuous ways by advocates.

What you'll normally see in the US context is the case that immigration is good for the federal budget and GDP growth. This is pretty much a consensus opinion. First, immigration simply boosts economic growth for the simple fact that a larger country will tend to have a larger economy. It is totally unclear if immigration tends to boost per capita GDP though, and there are clear example where waves of immigration have actually tanked per capita GDP.

Main point: fiscal health is not equivalent with social welfare, and the federal budget is not equivalent with "all government budgets."

The reason immigration helps the US federal budget is because most of the budget goes to entitlements for senior citizens and defense spending. Immigrants tend to be younger, and so, in the short to medium term, they pay in taxes to the entitlement system while not drawing benefits. However, in the long term, immigrants from the developing world actually hurt the budget outlook, because they tend to be lower earners and thus pay in comparatively less in taxes than the average American, while still being eligible for the same benefits in the future. In general, the more generous a state's welfare system, the less advantageous it is to the budget to have low-earning migrants move to the country.

The disingenuous part comes when liberals advocate in favor of illegal immigration by pointing out that most illegal immigrants pay into these entitlement programs but will not be eligible for them. Thus, they are a "net benefit," for the system. This is disingenuous because liberals generally agree that if these people pay into the system, they should get the benefits. It is not generally a liberal position that states benefit from having a large group of "second class citizens" who lack voting rights and access to basic welfare programs. Indeed, the liberal position is generally that these people should simply be legal immigrants.

The other sort of disingenuous claim is that immigrants "use less welfare than natives." This is true, if one controls for income, but when the context is: "is migration a net strain on the welfare state?" then the question is better framed in absolute terms. And here, it is true that low-income immigrants use significantly more assistance than the average citizen. This should shock no one; means tested benefits go to those with less means, that is how they are designed.

Re defense budgets: Defending the US takes the same amount of money if it has 300 million versus 330 million people. The added population doesn't really affect this part of the Federal budget, while it does contribute new tax revenues.

However, things shift dramatically at the state and local level. English language learners (ELL) are significantly more costly to educate. Special education students are even more costly to educate (maybe 2-3 times as much). Migrant families have a far higher share of students on IEPs (special education), and it is widely acknowledged that no state properly funds these programs. Additionally, the concentration of low income, ELL, and SPED students in a district seems to demonstrate profound congestion effects, such that these students impose costs on one another when concentrated within a district. In this way, migration can have profound effects on local services, especially once one takes into account what poor school system performance tends to do to real estate values, and thus local tax levies.

Of course, there are lots of ways US school funding should be fixed to deal with this issue. However, the point is simply that immigration can have profound negative effects of services locally under the current system.

In the US, there is also no effort to try to move new migrants into areas that have shrinking populations, where housing is cheap and labor in demand. Thus, all the congestion problems end up being compounded by the fact that migration is focused into expensive cities, and also focused into areas in the Southwest where water scarcity is an increasing issue.

The other issue is the way immigration affects inequality. Having a large number of migrants who tend to earn lower wages and who enter the country with very low networth necessarily increases inequality, at least in the short term.

In general, it is the wealthy who benefit the most from migration. The wealthy are insulated from congestion effects and the degradation of local services because they tend to live in places with high rents/home prices, which represent a barrier to migrants. The wealthy tend to own real estate, and so see their assets appreciate due to the increased demand for housing that comes with population growth. The wealthy also tend to purchase more labor, meaning they benefit the most from the increase in the labor supply and decrease in wages.

Meanwhile, it is poor natives who stand to see their rents increase and their wages decrease due to migration's effect on demand for housing and the supply of labor. Plus, there is further a negative relationship between the ability of workers to unionize and migration. Both factory owners of the Gilded Age and Amazon have produced memos on the benefits of a highly diverse workforce-- that this diversity acts as a check on unionization efforts.

The whole idea of "illegal colonization" by groups of refugees is itself problematic. Jewish settlement was initially encouraged by the Ottomans. Later waves of Ashkenazim were the result of their being the victims of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Mizrahim population of Israel moved there largely due to being expelled from the surrounding countries. We might ask, were the Huns colonizers? The Magyars? Are Muslims necessarily colonizers in India or Europe? Were the Mongols colonizers or simply conquerors?

It seems to me that "colonization" losses its meaning if stretched too far. There is a difference between migration, conquest, and colonization.

And how far can we go back with claims of "illegality?" Are the descendants of Europeans and Africans justified in living in the Americas? If not, how can we condemn the Serbs from trying to ethnically cleanse the Muslims who arrived in the Balkans due to contemporaneous Ottoman expansion into the area?

My problem with "colonizer/colonized" rhetoric is that it is often used in extremely reductive ways that don't take account of the particular history of any given context. At its worst, it seems to reduce to essentially a skin tone hierarchy, completely blind to any historical nuance.

I personally don't even think it's fair or legitimate for the US to expel illegal immigrants who moved into the country b]decades[/b] ago, so I find it hard to think of how I could be consistent in declaring that Jews in Palestine who have largely been there for at least a generation are somehow "illegal," simply by virtue of a "lack of proper history." Israel has done many reprehensible things, and it's those things they should be held to account for. But the issue can't be that the Jews there, writ-large, are "illegal" through their very presence. This sort of reductive thinking is fodder for the Israeli right and simply helps justify their abhorrent acts.

I find this generally agreeable. You might enjoy this article I read on Sunday, about this very topic

https://archive.md/2023.10.28-061758/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/decolonization-narrative-dangerous-and-false/675799/

Not the best writing, exactly, but it's some food for thought at least

This is made worse by claims in liberal media spaces (e.g., John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight") that economists essentially agree that immigration has net positive impacts for all of society, providing benefits without significant costs. This is simply not the real consensus in the field. — Count Timothy von Icarus

AFAIK, the consensus is that immigration is generally a net positive on total economic output in the long term, and that the long-term overall displacement effect is small. But the displacement effect is there in the short term and it overwhelmingly affects people who are already in a precarious employment. Is that roughly how you would characterise it as well?

More to the point, I wonder if the current left wing stance reveals a bit of internalised market absolutism. The idea that more openness, more trade, more movement of people is always a positive. I would not be surprised if this idea, that exchange fixes everything, a pillar of today's capitalist ideology, is at the root of this.

AFAIK, the consensus is that immigration is generally a net positive on total economic output in the long term, and that the long-term overall displacement effect is small. But the displacement effect is there in the short term and it overwhelmingly affects people who are already in a precarious employment. Is that roughly how you would characterise it as well?

I don't see any sort of consensus. Considerations of all the "long term effects" of migration bleed into political science as well. You end up with questions about how migration affects electoral politics, questions about how short-term increases in inequality can produce a long-term trend towards even greater inequality due to positive feedback mechanisms, etc. Disentangling all of these is quite difficult.

Obviously, you can't just compare outcomes in the countries with the highest rates of immigration. 14% of high-income nation's populations are foreign born, just 1.4% of low-income countries. The lowest migration states tend to have a low quality of life, e.g., North Korea, Haiti, etc., but clearly this isn't because they have low immigration. Rather, no one moves there because they have very low quality of life, particularly for the regions they are in.

But we might compare differences between rich nations.

Low immigration states include: Japan (2.0%), Finland (6.9%), Republic of Korea (2.3%), Lithuania (4.2%), the Czech Republic (4.8%), Poland (1.8%), Slovakia (3.4%), or Hungary (5.4%), Chile (4%) vesus

Ireland (17.1%), Sweden (20%), Germany (15.7%), USA (15.4%), France (14.1%), UK (14.1%)

But the problem here is that a lot of small, high immigration level states are actually quite selective about who is allowed to immigrate, so the rates alone don't necessarily answer our question. What stands out to me is this: immigration rates don't seem to have had a particularly big effect on growth, standard of living, or political stability one way or the other. You have Hungary, with low immigration but unsteady politics. You have Eastern European states with lower migration and better growth trajectories than the West, but this seems to partly to be catch-up growth, them gaining ground lost during Russia's occupation of half the continent. Japan and ROK face pressures from population declines, so they have some problems that are more acute, but they also seem to have avoided some problems by having less migration.

The only thing that stands out to me is that lower migration states tend to be a bit more equal vis-a-vis income inequality, but the effect is small and there are outliers on each side. Iceland is very equal but high migration. Japan isn't particularly equal but has low migration.

But that said, I don't think we know what the long-term ramifications are yet. On America's current trajectory, per Pew, about 1:4 Americans will be foreign born by 2050 and 1:2 will be foreign born or have at least one foreign born parent. The arguments over immigration are hard because the process is cumulative and societies are complex. There might be tipping points in the systems. I personally think the issues will tend to become more acute as:

1. Native populations age and more resources go towards retirement benefits.
2. Immigrant populations (first + second gen) come to make up more like 25-50+% of populations, what many wealthy nations will see in the second half of the century.

This sets up a fight over resources that splits by age, but then age also has come to track closely with ethnicity. It seems possible that tipping points exist. The last time nativism had so much reach in the US was the last time migration was a high as it is now.

The flip side is demand for emigration. That might go down across most of the world, but will surge in SSA, since their population is set to boom through 2100, surpassing Asia's population.

:up:

White people in Europe and North America generally tend towards low rates of reproduction -- a trend associated with more education and higher incomes. As a consequence, the demographics forms a mushroom effect of more elderly people than younger people can financially support and care for. China and Japan either have or soon will have the same kind of demographic problem.

Immigration solves this particular demographic problem: more young workers paying into government coffers, more young workers available to provide care for elderly people. France and the United States have immigration patterns that will support growing economies and provide younger workers to care for older people.

A number of European countries, like Italy, are neither reproducing nor adding enough immigrants to counteract the mushroom demographic problem.

Demographics is one thing. Culture and politics is a different concern, the medium or long term outcomes being uncertain.

Flannel J, I appreciate the point you are making but I think your premise is naive, one-dimensional, or wrong. I don't think the immigration of Jewish people into Palestine pre-state of Israel can stand alone as the cause of Palestinians' suffering. I don't think they are or were opposed to the Jewish settlers' way of life. I don't think Palestine was a majority 90% Muslim, but already had a significant indigenous Christian and smaller Jewish population. I dont think therefore that the allegedly leftist position on immigration does pose the amusing inconsistency you suggest. I think that if the current migration of Muslims (as you say) into western countries was coupled with an international order that these migrants be permitted to partition the US or UK and set up their own state, even western so called leftists might object. While you highlight that you are a leftist, you are implying that immigration alone, in mass numbers could create the same problem for Americans and Western Europeans as it (you imply) did for the Palestinians. The better analogy would be to compare Palestine/Israel to the expansion of the US by white settlers into Mexican or Native territories and the corresponding imposition of American statehood on same. If the indigenous Americans (rather than the so-called Left) were the ones loudly supporting mass migration of immigrants into America, and calling for those immigrants' rights to establish statehood, a finding of amusing inconsistency might be more apt.

I agree with you on that. I think if that were a serious possibility I might fight to oppose it. But that's not an anti-immigration stance. — bert1

How is it not related to immigration? I am supportive of women's rights and the rights of LGBTQ. If an immigrant is not supportive of those rights (and is downright hostile to women and LGTBQ) why would I want them to join my society?

so let me try to break it down: leftist institutions are full of people chanting 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!' — flannel jesus

Actually, the river to the sea is the slogan of the Likud party. And I think it's working for them well... :smirk:

Here's the crux of the argument: Palestinians themselves are currently suffering from the literal nightmare scenario of the unfettered immigration of a bunch of people who they believed had an opposing way of life. Palestinians are literally the victim of the very thing "racist white Europeans" are trying to avoid. — flannel jesus

Here's the crux of a counter-argument: migrant workers and refugees don't have the objective to create a new (Muslim?) country in Europe and aren't up taking arms and fighting to do that. Or if you think so, then you aren't going to quite extreme conspiracy theories and this conversation is meaningless.

Actually this is quite similar to the slogans that anti-immigration Finns (racists?) had years ago: The present situation of the Native Americans in the US is an example of having lax immigration laws. Obviously they should have had more stringent immigration laws!!!

My thesis is this: if you have sympathy for Palestinians in this situation, because they are living in the worst nightmare scenario of the result of unfettered immigration of a perceived "hostile culture", then you should also have sympathy for the "racist white Europeans" who are trying to avoid the nighmare scenarios that come with unfettered immigration of perceived "hostile cultures". — flannel jesus

Oh yes, we white Europeans will be living in reservations or worse... how was the chant? We will be replaced?

But seriously, haven't you noticed how the views on immigration have already changed in Europe? Or are you still reading Douglas Murray's The Strange Death of Europe? Thing do have changed since 2015-2016 migrant crisis, you know.

Immigrants don't have rights but we have all committed to allowing refugees to gain asylum. So I think we should be ignoring refugees here because they actually have a right to asylum and countries generally have an obligation to keep them safe.

The immigration problem is grossly exaggerated in the Netherlands - and probably most other European counties. Most immigration is labour migration: people who are asked to work here because we either don't have the people or nobody local wants to do the work.

Those workers generally bring families too. They are exploited and now about 75% of homeless people are labour immigrants who were abused by perfidious secondment companies.

But in general agree with the sentiment that a sovereign states can make immigration rules (excluding refugees) but the debate is often fact free and has very little consideration for the effects on businesses that rely on an influx of foreign labourers. Especially if we want to manage an energy transition now that nobody in the Netherlands knows how to build something as everybody was pushed to academic studies because we culturally look down on manual labour. And that's biting us in the ass.