In the other thread, someone (edit: “kamal”) insisted that this ridiculous phrase meant midwives, doulas and other people who assist mothers in birth. It is hard to imagine such a ridiculous contortion of our language. Do the Democrats think that males can give birth?
edited to name user kamal who obviously could not make himself believe that any sane person would use this circumlocution.
Argyll naked link post
And your point is?
By the way, I think the rules of this forum should outlaw naked link posts. many other forums have this rule.
Kamala didn’t ask me, but here’s a good review of a Dutch paper on immigration and the costs of social welfare. They look at the economic costs and benefits of immigrants of various categories, such as students, refugees, workers, families, etc. the country and region of origin are also considered.
The report “Borderless welfare state” deals with the consequences of immigration for Dutch public finances. It answers the following questions:
• What are the fiscal costs and benefits of immigration by migration motive (labour, study, asylum and family migration) and by region of origin?
• To what extent can immigration provide a solution to the ageing population in the Netherlands?The study uses microdata from 2016 provided by Statistics Netherlands. These are very detailed, anon- ymized data of all 17 million Dutch residents, including about two million people with a first-generation migration background and almost two million people with a second-generation migration background.
And the results would dismay anyone seeking a financially stable country. Nearly all immigration aside from skilled workers from other developed counties, is a very large net loss and that continues into the second generation as far as that data was available.
- Those coming to take up a job generate a positive net contribution of, on average, €125,000 ($152,500) per immigrant.
- Those coming to study cost €75,000 ($91,500) per immigrant.
- Those entering for “family formation” or “family reunification” cost €275,000 ($335,500) per immigrant. (Get one immigrant, then get their marriage partner, then get other family members including elderly parents).
- Asylum seekers cost €475,000 ($579,500) per immigrant.
There are also considerable differences by region of origin. On average, Western immigrants make a positive contribution of €25,000 ($30,500), while non-western immigrants cost nearly €275,000 ($335,500). Immigration from non-Western regions is usually unfavourable for public finances. This applies especially to the areas of origin Caribbean, West-Asia, Turkey and North, Central and West Africa with net costs ranging from €200,000 to €400,000 per immigrant, and Morocco, the Horn of Africa and Sudan with net cost of €550,000 to €600.000 per immigrant. By way of comparison: an average Dutch native is roughly ‘budget-neutral over’ his or her life.
Why would a country with unresolved poverty and social issues start importing refugees at close to a million a pop in terms of their drain on your society’s resources? Incidentally, the IQ / educational performance of the immigrants mattered a lot to their impact, with better ones being large positives while worse ones being large negative ones.
And the benefits of immigrants?
In case you are wondering, they far outweigh the costs by megatons.
The first statistic on your list is one of those benefits: “Those coming to take up a job generate a positive net contribution of, on average, €125,000 ($152,500) per immigrant.”
Most of the major corporations have inventors and founders who were immigrants and children of immigrants. You keep claiming they are a drain on resources. They certainly haven’t hurt the US economy at all. They contribute to it and pay taxes that help you.
Trump is the son of an immigrant. Four of Trump’s children are born of an immigrant.
Mike Pence had a grandparent and great grandparents who were immigrants.
Joe Arpaio is the son of two Italian immigrants.
Ted Cruz was born in Canada to Canadian citizens (one of whom was also a Cuban citizen, one also had American citizenship). His father was a Cuban immigrant who was a citizen of Canada but lived mostly in the US. He didn’t become a US citizen until 2005 and still retains his Cuban citizenship.
Marco Rubio is the son of two immigrants.
Mitch McConnell’s wife is an immigrant born in Taipei, Taiwan.
I could go on.
Where are your ancestors from?
Your first statistic, is rightly a good one. Those illegals trudging across the river, trying to invade. % that might generate $152,500?
You mentioned mostly good strong Republicans. What is your motive?
Where are your ancestors from? You know my answer!! Proud Native Americans. 
Sure you could go on. But would you ever get around to mentioning a refugee? I’m pretty certain no one has expressed any contempt for immigrants in the first category. Yet, surprisingly (or not), that category is the sole focus of your retort.
More than one of them. (Not terrible politicians, but refugees) We wrongly turned away a lot of them.
You are reminding me why I stopped even looking at the first “part 1” thread months ago. I know, I know, you’re going to blindly keep pushing your preferred talking point regardless of the context of what you’re responding to.
How does no anti-refugee politician being a refugee themselves demonstrate that all refugees are bad?
Keep on push, push, pushing that talking point. No matter how irrelevant to the topic.
The data was the average cost of a refugee on the society accepting them. To which the response was a list of successful immigrants who were not refugees.
Of course there are benefits - nearly everyone in the US is an immigrant at some point, and we’re one of the best places in the world. But that very much depends on who those immigrants are and how they are screened / selected, which was a key finding of the study. Most of the US immigration historically was from Europe, a group that shows favorable marks in the Dutch study.
It’s mathematically obvious, although some try not to admit it, that you can’t provide a US level societal safety net / welfare system to the whole world’s population given the resources we have. As such, if you let the whole world’s poor show up and get benefits, you’ll be broke and just become another third world country. Much of the US historical immigration was before there was any welfare and you were on your own when you showed up to work hard to survive.
So you can’t let everyone in and the point of immigration policy should be to decide on the priorities and costs associated with legal immigration and encourage it, especially for those candidates who might make a positive contribution to the country. Why would you want people who would contribute negatively, either through crimes or economic dependency?
Smart immigration policy, like Trump proposed where high quality candidates were welcome, is a boon to US society and the economy. Dumb immigration policy, like open borders letting in random unscreened and unskilled workers or families, refugees from violent places, etc, are imposing significant costs on the US. If the US welfare is comparable to the Dutch one, each of those 150-200,000 illegals coming across the border each month under Biden’s open border policy means the US is incurring $50 billion per month in future costs (at roughly $250k/pp)!
You’re 100% wrong. The vast majority of American immigrants were in poverty, including the ones from Europe. Rich people with status in society had no reason to move to America.
We would have missed out on everything that made America great and an innovative, creative economy if they just allowed only already made rich people with no interest in doing anything much into the country.
America was also the country where they could thrive and get an education and move around in the economy with far fewer restrictions than in the old countries. That’s why people came.
There are similar back stories to many immigrants to America who arrived with nothing. The ancestors of America’s founders were not wealthy people. That includes George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, etc. Their ancestors were able to come to America and own land, make businesses, and create a world they could not in the old country. They were the ones eager to create education and opportunities for all and build a great America – not complacent rich people. And this is the attitude that united them against the old Europe. The “pursuit of happiness” is a specific phrase meaning that people would not be stuck in social classes and could choose professions or vocations they wanted, found businesses, own land, and not be restricted by their class. They came for mobility and opportunity.
Actually, it was a little worse than I described. From early colonial times, the 1630s, to the American Revolution 50-70% of European immigrants came under indentures, as indentured servants. The majority did this voluntarily to get passage to America and many were relatives of free emigrating Englishmen. A smaller number of indentured servants came involuntarily. Some were kidnapped. American courts did not always recognize indenture contracts signed in Europe. Most, if not all, of these people were in poverty and signed the contracts to get to America.
The total number of European immigrants to all 13 colonies before 1775 was about 500,000; of these 55,000 were involuntary prisoners. Of the 450,000 or so European arrivals who came voluntarily, it is estimated that 48% were indentured.
A lot of American immigrants were also debtors deported from England. Georgia was founded as a colony for debtors and poor people from England.
Of course, we’re just talking about Europeans here. I’m sure you’re aware of another population imported involuntarily by Americans who were happy to get wealthy off their labor. By 1775, African Americans made up 20% of the population of the colonies.
Trump’s grandfather arrived with next to nothing with no education, not speaking English, illegally leaving Germany and worked in a barbershop before learning how to scam people. Trump’s mother was literally dirt poor, living in virtual hovels on the isle of Lewis, with little education, didn’t know English until she went to secondary school, and arrived in the US with $50 where she began as a domestic servant. Your ideas would exclude them from a plutocratic America.
You need to get the bizarre attitude out of your head that wealthy, educated people were the main immigrants to America. Most of the people coming from the beginning were lower class people with little traction in society.
I want the reverse of what you want – people who have not made it and come to America for the opportunity to live and work and get an education.
These are the people who built America and made it great.
Good history lesson!
But this is not what we have now. We have laws that Biden has thrown out the window. Gotta get more illegals in, more democrat voters. Rush before Republicans get back in office.
Pitiful commentary from the left!
The first key on immigration, then vs. now, is today’s massive American welfare state which did not exist back then.
The other key is human nature. Then, as now, human nature has not changed. NOT everyone!! But a great many people will work only as hard as they must to avoid real hardship.
In the past people, all people, worked hard in order to have food to eat and to avoid suffering Today suffering has been outlawed and toil can much more easily be evaded, including by far too many immigrants. Hence:
It is asinine to compare immigration in the past with immigration today. It’s apples and oranges.
Your point being? Are you implying it was a politically motivated domestic terror attack against “democrats”?
Seems highly unlikely. The article cited people who knew the shooter that indicated he was unwell. Good question why mentally unstable individual had access to a firearm…
My point was that this wasn’t anti-mask trump supporters. @Argyll has a tendency to post blind links, so I don’t know what his point is usually. I assumed he saw the headline and the state “Georgia” and was trying to bring light to an instance of pro-trump anti-mask violence. I just wanted to dispel that claim by pointing out it was unlikely that this was an anti-mask trump supporter.
