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Friday, January 19, 2018

Immigration in history

Today's post appears here.

5 comments:

Bozon said...

Professor

Thanks for the new post. I don't want to go in that site's direction.

I tried to do a couple of similar sites, in the past. Too many hoops, and hooks, for me.

Blogger is easy.

Your links to articles in Time, also.

All the best.

Bozon said...

Professor
ps
I hate PDFs, and their piratical business model, with a purple passion.
All the best

Ed Boyle said...

Earlier immigration waves had a higher percentage vis-a-vis the local population. 10 million is 3% not dxactly a large amount with 1% growth per year it is really insignificant. Los Angeles, NYC metro area and Texas have 2 million illegals each so it is really quite concentrated. Taking of jobs and crime are a big complaint when everyone is suffering from low paying jobs, living on credit cards. Typically it is easy to criticize foreigners when times are hard. In such times it is motre likely that the screws will be tightened on immigration. The cris will likely be economic. Global debt bubble due to central bank stimulus is increasingly useless over time as consumers are tapped out, overproduction globally is a problem. Economic crises lead to trade wars and real wars. The very mechanism of integration of immigrated population through crisis wars shows that we create a growth pattern, also with immigration and then when our system malfunctions we as a society become aggressive internaly and/or externally(civil war/foreign conflict). In a society with lower expectations of growth, less immigration and more homogeneity, crisis response would be smaller. So stability for a more mature culture(old world perhaps) would be more likely although industrialism has put us all in a rat race for last centuries and bloodshed has been great everywhere. At any rate a conservative response in bad times would be to slow down, expect less. Consumerism, wastefulness, egoistic individualism could be replaced with local production of long lasting goods that are repaired, not discarded and less travel, less income, more family time. So 3rd world cultural standards instead of industrial high tech, alienation could be the answer. And the people already here, if willing to adapt to less, like locals back home in Mexico, Africa could stay, others would remain home as American dream as a magnet would be gone. After this generational cycle is finished in next decade, probably with a diminution of Western power, the next 80 year cycle will likely have as main focus ecological, overpopulation and resource shortage problems. Alt energy as currently conceived cannot maintain 24/7/365 energy, transport, production so we are on downslope from here on out. Population decline plus consumption decline means a fight of more people for fewer resources in a destroyed natural environment with unstable climate. This means drought, famine, war, disease outbreaks, unimagined natural disasters. Global superpowers and expanding trade, multiculturalism will be passe. Localize, make do and mend, mind own business will be trend. What you described historicaly is an upward trend which will be soon reversed.

Gloucon X said...

“the new wave of immigration, which, like the others, has met a very real demand for labor, and enriched America.”

That’s a really tough sell to people in the bottom half of the income ladder since there is no evidence that this supposed immigration caused enrichment of America has benefited them. Also, I’m not familiar with any economic data indicating the existence of any significant demand for labor that needed to be met--job growth has been tepid at best since the brief tech related boom of the late 1990s. So what we have is a wave of mass immigration corresponding with a period of economic decline over the last few decades that produced nothing but immiseration for a large number of Americans. It would be quite phenomenal if these Americans did not associate their own impoverishment with concurrent mass immigration, which they are reminded of every day whenever they hear Spanish.

Bozon said...

Professor
Just reading other comments, I get the gist...

Russia had forced millions of its Jews on Europe, and thence on America, starting even in the 19th Century.

Trust me, it was not done to satisfy any sort of labor shortage in Western or Eastern Europe, or even America by the end of the 19th Century,or frankly any sort of labor surplus in Russia that the Czar was interested in addressing.

The US later foisted many thousands of Muslims on Western Europe, in the early 60s, in the aftermath of WWII, and while there were plenty already, stirring in Eastern Europe and the Balkans for centuries against both Orthodox and Catholic majorities.

How many wholesome alien civilization guest workers, refugees, or illegals, are ever enough?

All the best