OnImmigration

I'm an immigrant.

So I guess I'm chill with the concept.

But it's become a horribly important driver of politics in the 2010s and 2020s ...

• ImmigrationAndTrust
• TheFarRight
• IdentityPolitics
• Brexit
• DonaldTrump / Trump2024

One of my go-to arguments against people who claim their opposition to immigration is about protecting jobs and salaries for local workers, is to ask

Would you rather compete against a worker here, when he has same costs as you? Or in his home country where his costs may well be much lower?

In other words, you are more at risk of losing your job to someone via OffShoring, to a factory the other side of the world, where costs are systemically lower. Whereas if someone comes to your country, and has to pay the same for food and housing as you, they will need the same salary as you, and you have a much better chance of competing with them.

I think it's a sound argument. But there are two flaws in it.

The obvious issue from a left-wing perspective is that it validates competition between workers, which is inherent to Capitalism. That makes it an argument that's fine from a liberal perspective. But not from someone further to the left.

The other issue is that it really hangs on the kind of economy and work you are in. It's completely valid for a manufacturing job making products in a factory. But not for a service job which is necessarily tied to a place. So it's another place where the ClassWarBetweenProductsAndServices comes into play. But not in the way the original author thought of it. (He sees the services being left-wing and the products people being right wing. Whereas here it's the services people whose jobs are tied to location, become the PeopleOfSomewhere)