It really blows my mind that the US makes it so hard to get in legally and stay. The US is turning away so many talented individuals that could vastly add to the nation in many different ways.
Time and time again, any attempts to provide a safety net are destroyed at the onset.
Majority of blue collar manufacturing jobs have left for China. Most states are flat lining and apart from tech what major growth industry is there? I guess if you work for a government supported industry you are safe (defense, military etc.)
In this environment seeing people fly in from the rest of the world and earn massive salaries on the coasts while the rest of the country is being strip mined for every last penny that it has left is not something that will endure support for immigration.
This environment has resulted in >50% of the population with a great sense of anger against the perceived causes. They will continue to vote in more and more extreme version of Trump to 'solve the problem'.
Yes the US is risking its last growth industry but those people do not care (rightfully so since they don't feel as if they are benefiting anyway).
I really don't know how the US is going to come back from this. The end result of this is some sort of collapse. There needs to be bold leadership at all levels that pushes back on the causes of these problems but I don't see anybody on the horizon willing to do this.
I would take that stat with a huge grain of salt. According to the original source[1], of the 40% of people who couldn't easily pay the expense, 43% say they would put the expense on a credit card and pay the credit card over time. So the reality is that most people already have a balance on their card, and would put any surprise expenses on their card and continue to make the payments which they can afford. Less than %2 of all credit cards are delinquent, so it seems most people are affording their monthly payments just fine.
Also, in the article you linked, they mention that the same stat for households making $100k+ a year is 17%. 17% of people making 6 figures don't have $400 saved??? If people are unable to save 0.4% of their income, no amount of economic growth will help them.
This is a combination of the uselessness of self reported statistics, poor budgeting skills, and ambiguous questions.
Honestly the point was to demonstrate the declining standard of living of Americans. I could have also brought up the stat that the majority of bankruptcies in the US are medical related.
> Honestly the point was to demonstrate the declining standard of living of Americans.
That's a bad way to prove your point, because the 40% in your stat is _down_ from 50% a few years prior. The number of bankruptcies has also been steadily falling since 2010.
My point is that things are better than you think, and generally improving.
Do you seriously believe that people having to put $400 on their credit card isn't a sign of increasing poverty? You are that daft?
From your original source:
>Among those with a credit card, about half always or almost always paid their bill in full each month, while 2 in 10 did so some of the time and slightly over one-fourth carried a balance most of the time(figure 18). Twenty-eight percent of those with a credit card paid only the minimum on their bill at least some of the time. The frequency of regular borrowing with credit cards during 2017 is similar to 2016.
It is absurd to look at these stats and think that everything is fine. These are worrying numbers. This shows that there is a certain % of the population living paycheck to paycheck and honestly for people looking this was obvious in 2019. The outcome of this situation now coming to fruition where people don't want to work below a certain wage level and so many jobs go unfilled.
Furthermore the sign of bankruptcies declining does not disprove the claim that the majority of bankruptcies are medical related.
> Do you seriously believe that people having to put $400 on their credit card isn't a sign of increasing poverty? You are that daft?
Less people would rely on a credit card for $400 today than 10 years ago. That's a sign of decreasing poverty.
I'm not arguing that everything is perfectly fine. There are people struggling. But the trend is undeniably positive. People are better off today than 10 years ago, and the same was true 10 years ago as well.
> Furthermore the sign of bankruptcies declining does not disprove the claim that the majority of bankruptcies are medical related.
This was your claim:
> Honestly the point was to demonstrate the declining standard of living of Americans.
Yes, most bankruptcies are medical related. But bankruptcy rates are down, so your point that this indicates declining standard of living is nonsense.
Yes you are right but put yourself in the shoes of the people who vote for these anti-immigration policies. Decade after decade of decline does not give them the freedom to care if some startup that they may never hear of gets created in one of them "coastal elite" cities.
All they see is probably what they watched on the TV show Silicon Valley or what they hear in the news. I fully believe that if things were improving for them, they would be welcoming immigrants with open arms (or at least not minding them). However that is not the case. So in an environment where there isn't abundance but scarcity, it is a zero sum game.
We know the root cause of the problem. It is very well defined. The elites of this country have essentially sold out the middle class by shipping their jobs overseas and depress wages in every industry by methods such as H1-B visas to further keep people from climbing the economic ladder. This has destroyed countless towns and cities and left millions in desperation with no hope for any dignified future for them or their kids.
The solution to this issue is not a "conversation", its action. Obama was elected in a massive landslide by these very people because he promised "Hope and Change". Instead he accelerated efforts to further destroy what little the middle class had left. So as a response, the people elected a populist who promised to stop the bleeding in an aggressive manner (ie. stop immigration). He did not fulfill any of his promises and now we are left with a population that is even more angry. The next step is going to be even worse.
No not propaganda and corporate media. A problem with how the elites run this country. They use tools such as immigration to depress wages and destroy towns and cities when whole industries are shipped overseas. As a result, a desperate population will cling to scapegoats such as immigrants and will be motivated to put a stop to it. Propaganda and corporate media are just tools used by opportunists to make money.
Your boss sets the wage. He also collaborates with "free trade" politicians to move whole industries overseas to places where human rights are not respected and labor organizers are regularly murdered. The elites use propaganda and corporate media to convince "a desperate population" that immigrants are the problem, not their collusion with capital.
Immigrants don't "destroy towns" they reinvigorate them[1].
I’ve definitely wondered how easier immigration would affect my salary. I could see a lot of talented devs quitting their jobs to start companies that would hopefully recruit me with better benefits than I currently have.
Honestly I'm thinking more and more that devs only have 1-2 decades left before enough of the stack gets easy enough to automate. While there is a whole process in developing quality software that is extremely difficult to automate, often many shops don't require this and so it remains to be seen if these high salaries will be sustainable. With the rising costs of maintaining a solid middle class life in this country and no safety net, I suspect this magical opportunity a few have been fortunate enough to get will not exist for the next generation of developers. Efforts such at TPP and "Learn to Code" are tools used to chip away at this advantage these workers in the tech industry currently have over employers.
The only hope I have is that most efforts to automate real software development have fallen apart thus far and that it is hard to do this job for many people trying to "learn to code". However I worry about what AI advancements will bring. No way to know until it happens...
As an Indian, the US is by far one of the hardest countries to get into long-term. There is constant uncertainty about when you'll be kicked out.
This is why when I had the choice, I picked Germany over the US. Because I know that no matter what, in 3 years, I can apply for a PR, and in 8, citizenship. The new government is talking about reducing this time frame, but even if they don't it's still a lot faster than waiting decades for a GC.
While the US is still the top immigration destination of choice amongst Indians, other English speaking countries are now easier to get into and most Indians prefer a stable future so they skip the US in favor of other countries.
Long term, if the US wants to retain it's ability to attract top talent, they need to do away with place-of-birth based visa and GC restrictions.
>If we end the visa lotteries, curb illegal immigration, we'll have more room for merit based immigrants.
This is a total non-sequitor. Having "more room," removing the entirely artificial barriers to citizenship, has nothing to do with illegal immigration and visa lotteries. The people in charge can remove the barriers whenever they decide to, but instead they work to convince you that "illegal immigration" is causing the problem. They blame "illegal immigration" because it provides an easy scapegoat for their negligence, a convenient foundation on which to build mass support for their subsequent election while ignoring the problems their base actually has.
Are there limitless resources? Is there a limit to immigration? Do other countries have limits? Answer these questions. Noone convinced me of anything, I determined my opinion based on experiences and facts.
Yes illegal immigration takes away from legal immigration. Yes our immigration system needs updating. No, we don't agree on how to update it.
Both sides have had congress. Your quarrel is not with me, but with your representatives. I scold mine every election cycle, have you ever?
>Yes illegal immigration takes away from legal immigration.
Bullshit. This line of thinking is designed to get immigrants fighting and hating each other. A tool for the elites to divide immigrants into "deserving" and "undeserving" factions.
Nope. It's simply respecting the laws and being an adult.
No other country just lets you walk in, I'd love to just walk into Japan and be a citizen without learning the language or anything, but I'd be doing myself and their country a disservice.
Do you honestly think the immigrants who did all that shit want to see people cut the system? I'll give you a hint, no they don't.
Illegal immigration causes family hardship, deaths from the journey, 33% chance of rape for girls, human trafficking, cartel violence / funding, gang proliferation, etc.
Supporting that enables those things to continue. You aren't being compassionate, you're being childish.
There's a massive difference between "just walk in" and what we actually have: waiting a hundred years for the probable chance at a backlog somewhere being cleared to process your highly restrictive visa. You are being hyperbolic.
>Illegal immigration causes family hardship, deaths from the journey, 33% chance of rape for girls, human trafficking, cartel violence / funding, gang proliferation, etc.
All those effects are caused by the militarization of the border and the failure to create realistic paths to citizenship. You are blaming the victims of our system for the horrors that are visited upon them by people that take advantage of the artificially high barriers.
We accept fewer immigrants now than before. Immigration has thus far kept the percentage change of population positive, despite the fact that the number of Green Cards issued had been declining even before the pandemic. The most recent census recorded one the lowest percentages of population growth. And our low population density indicates we have plenty of room.
> It really blows my mind that the US makes it so hard to get in legally and stay.
Huh, why it blows your mind? Is it some kind of human right that anyone can come to US at any point in time and just start living there. Besides if they are so talented why they can't stay in home country and apply the talent.
I would think that a significant proportion of native born American households (including most politicians) have at least one immigrant grandparent, and the conditions that led to them leaving their native home. You would think that a people who are well acquainted with their own relatively recent roots in the country would be more open to the idea in general.
>We'd have more resources available if there was less illegal immigration.
Wrong. The resources are under the control of the capital elite. They can decide at any time to allocate them to suit socially useful purposes, horde them or gamble them on the latest NFT fad.
Immigrants have no control over resource allocation.
Well, the response to your comment was right there in the second sentence you, for some reason, failed to quote: "The US is turning away so many talented individuals that could vastly add to the nation in many different ways."
No, but if I'm running a country and talented people want to move to my country and bring their skills, then I would want to open my borders to them. That way my country will theoretically be better off than other countries.
