zen_tom

Reading this story from the BBC:
So people are risking life and limb to get into Europe (or out of Africa) and I suppose they may also be doing the same thing over the Mexican border into the US, and over countless other borders between rich nations and poor ones.

Water flows from high ground to low ground, and people, it seems, flow from areas of less development into areas of more development. Is it possible to stop, or is it a powerful natural phenomenon like Niagara Falls, or New Orleans?

If it is possible to stop then how? And would it be economically feasible?

And if it's not possible/feasible, then how can we best secure ourselves against future problems?

Well, assuming the analogy of water flowing from higher, to lower ground, we can either make ourselves poorer, thus making our countries less attractive to outsiders, or we can help to develop and enrichen those other countries, in order to raise the standards of living to a point where people are no longer willing to risk their lives in hopping the border.

So my summary points are: Aren't massed illegal immigration attempts like this symptomatic of the depth of inequality between the countries of the world, and is it not in the West's interests to ease the disparity? Failure to do so will mean building higher walls, and employing more heavily armed guards along our borders in order to keep the desperate foreigners off our lands.

Is that how we want to live?

Charlatan

I think, unfortunately, that the answer for many is to just build higher walls and have better armed guards.

I think the real lasting answer is a combination of better development abroad and tighter security and better immigration laws at home.

A couple things to think about:

1) if we should share in the development of underdeveloped nations, what form should this take? (i.e. cash will likely just find its way into corrupt pockets)
2) there are already many multinationals on the ground in underdeveloped nations. These nations provide cheap labour to support our high rate of consumption.
3) what would it take to make us poorer? ( by this what I really mean is what would it take for us to consume less?)

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martinguerre

zen, i think you have a point. immigration is kind of the equivalent of the ultimate free trade zone. in the end, it's much to our benifit to promote economic development in other areas. worldwide development means more opportunity to trade...and that labor wouldn't have as much incentive to cross political boundaries.

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alansmithee

Bigger fences and more guards...sounds about right.

If people want to enter another country permenantly, there are laws for immigrating. It isn't our job to develop other nations. If people envy the US, or EU nations, they should work in their countries to implement gov'ts that mirror the US or EU, and put in policies that will naturally allow for growth.

hannukah harry

i really see only two ways to stop illegal immigration (in a way that oddly parellels terrorism). first, you can give armed border gaurds the authority to 'shoot to kill' people illegally entering the country, which would be a more short term method and long term you would need to help build up the economy and development of their home countries so they'd no longer want to illegally enter our country.

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pan6467

Wow I agree with hannukah for once... shoot to kill is a bit extreme... prison or some form of true punishment would be more humane.

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zen_tom

No, it's certainly not our job, but I'm saying that it might be in our best interests.

And martinguerre makes a great point, allowing free immigration is an extension of pure capitalism and the ideals of free trade. Everyone out for themselves right? If we believe in the capitalist system, shouldn't we allow everyone, all round the world to believe in it too?

In some ways, employing government sponsored guards and immigration controls is an acceptance of the authority of, and a call for, big government, as well as an admission that capitalism, the free market, and opportunity for all is not the answer.

Yes, people from other countries might be better off if they adopted more western systems of government, but how can we expect them to do so, if we refuse to stick to the ideals we pretend to hold so dearly?

Capitalism is a very Darwinistic way of running a country, and as such is an efficient one because it mirrors the natural world in which we live. All I'm doing is pointing out one of the inconsistencies that governments in the west, who purport to believe in the capitalist ideal are failing to recognise. i.e. If you choose to believe in every man for himself, then you must also expect people from different countries to hold those ideals true themselves, and do their utmost to put themselves in a position where they can benefit from those idealistic, and individualistic ideals themselves.

So, yes, we can choose to build higher walls, and adopt "shoot to kill policies", but in doing so, aren't we admitting the failure of our ideals?

zen_tom

As an aside, I might be wrong, but I think Hannukah Harry was simply putting my original post into different words - I agree with him whole heartedly, in his analysis in terms of dispassionate short-term vs long-term solutions.

Which is likely to be more effective I wonder?

flstf

The problem as I see it is that the E.U. and the U.S. are not true capitalistic countries. Both offer a variety of social programs to their citizens (Europe more than the U.S. of course).

I think allowing more immigration would be a good thing if we limited the amount of social benefits available to new residents. Say something like a 10 year waiting period before eligibility.

The U.S. is a nation of immigrants and most of our families have only been here for a few generations. However when most of our families came here there was no social safety net.

I have no idea how to encourage the less developed countries to adopt more robust economies, but I will say that the engineers and craftsmen that I have worked with in Mexico over the years have been very intelligent and hard working people.

hannukah harry

i don't think i was intending to put your OP in different words, but that may be how it turned out. i just think that if we don't want it to be happening, in the short term we have to take drastic measures (kill on site, i think something like saying we're going to imprison them might not be believed, or be believed by many to be a better deal than living in their home countries, and then we still still have to pay for incarcerating them) and work on long term solutions that make their homes as attractive to them as ours are. so i guess we're probably just in agreement then.

btw, i don't think that we should be doing this, it's just the only real solutions i see to the problem.

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MichaelFarker

Governments, like that of the US, are inefficient in providing long-term aid.

The other killer problem is the complexity of the situations in the poor countries. Many African nations and people groups will continue to suffer horrible poverty as long as members of different tribes keep murdering each other. Also, anywhere there are disease epidemics like AIDS people are going to have serious difficulty trying to change their lives. Jumping onto the industrialization bandwagon is harder and more expensive the later you do it, so it may not be possible to industrialize a lot more nations without significant improvements in pure science. (Pure science leading to radical paradigm shifts, I mean.) As a final example, how do you prevent the humiliation and loss of dignity inherent in being helped (or ignored) by a much more prosperous nation?

I don't think immigration itself is the problem. Dieing to try for a small chance at a better life is much better than watching your family starve because your people group's enemies are hording all the food. Trying to stop immigration is futile and unhealthy. You could briefly stop it by positioning real military units on your own boarders, but the problems with that range from moral (murdering helpless people as they try to cross) to practical (over time the soldiers would become ineffective, disatisfied, maybe compromised).

The US economy benefits from immigration so we would be hurting ourselves anyway. Probably the best way for the US government to help potential immigrants is to allow a lot more into the country. Short of a series of natural disasters, that would help our economy by increasing the number of consumers, improving our pool of ideas, and giving us a steady stream of cheap, hardworking labor.

You suggest fixing the problems in poor countries. Private organizations do it better than governments. If every US citizen gave a small fraction of their money to an effective relief and construction organization things would actually get better.