How big is immigration an issue on people's minds (USA and elsewhere)?

aelf

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It has been said that immigration is one of the key issues that drove Trump's election victory in the USA. The average Joe is worried about it. The Dems didn't adopt a hardline position towards the border soon enough. Some people on OT bang on it's importance as well.

What do the polls say? Well, nearly half of U.S. adults say legal immigration into the United States should be kept at present levels. Overall, according the Pew survey, more adults in the US support increasing immigration (30%) over decreasing immigration (22%).

"But how can that be??" the anti-immigration folks on OT might ask. Are these respondents all bougie posers?

Maybe, in a way? I used to work in the research and polling industry, and what people think is the 'right' answer may influence their response (social desirability bias), especially when the question is phrased in ways that encourage it. If you ask people whether murder is acceptable, for example, I suspect the likelihood is people would answer "no" even if the victim is someone extremely evil. We've all been taught murder is unacceptable. It's one of the basic tenets of social living that's been drilled into us. But does that mean we don't feel that such a victim deserved it?

I've personally witnessed how people start off being PC in a qualitative study (focus groups), where I had the opportunity to dig deeper, before they eventually abandon that after finding out they have agreement from their peers. So, yes, maybe respondents are being bougie and woke (because that's a certifiably bougie thing, something the true salt of the earth would never be).

I'm inclined to believe that immigration is one of those issues which people's feelings might be negative about, but they can perhaps not rationally be too negative about. The negative feelings may be enough to drive people's behaviour, but they may not admit it, at least not openly.

Do you agree? How do you feel people's attitudes are towards immigration in your country, and are those reflected in what they say in polite company?
 
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"Puts on the conspiracy theorist hat"

It is a normal procedure for globalists. Here in Latvia we had like 800 000 people in our capital city Riga back in 2021.

In last 3 years we have gotten over 50 000 Ukrainian immigrants (which are mostly legal) and then we have about same size of immigrants from Arab countries. Both legal and illegal.
Some universities have made especially good accommodations for foreign students. Therefore we have thousands of students from India studying here to become doctors and lawyers.

That means that over last 3 years our capital city which was 60% Latvian, 35% Russian, 5% other now is 54% Latvian, 30% Russian, 16% other nationalities.

The worst thing is that government pays HUGE benefits to all immigrants. Like you can eat for 10 euros a day in Riga if you have a family of four people, but they get allotted 40 euros per day.
There are very many pensioners and people doing minimum wage jobs who feed their families for 5-8 euros a day living on potatoes and other cheap vegetables, while the immigrants get to eat anything they desire.

It is brutally unfair. Government says it is European Union's money, but we know that there is agenda behind this and local municipalities go along with it, because it pays so much to do so.

We have Wolt/Bolt workers who work on E-bikes delivering food around the city and almost all of them are of Arab origin. Which isn't bad, it just marginalized this job as an immigrant job.
Since 2021 we have seen so many places to eat kebabs open that it is obvious there is a huge market which wasn't there before. Latvians and Russians aren't fond of kebabs, we have our meat and potatoes based foods.

In public transport we can see these people and they are docile. We don't have terrorist attacks. Older people are afraid of the immigrants for the most part though.

If this keeps going on we will have capital city Riga with less than 50% Latvians within next 5-10 years. Latvian language is heard on the streets less and less. Of course it is the only national language,
but many people speak Hindu, Arabic, German, Russian, French. If you go to the old city where the business centre of city lies, chances are you will hear English before Latvian.

At the same time many local people don't have jobs, because immigrants are willing to live in poorer conditions and work for less money. So many local young people emigrate(!) to UK and Germany
to earn salaries which are better.

This creates a situation that the most intellectually gifted and business capable young people emigrate while people who whine that "everything is bad, immigration is bad, my country is bad" stay and spread the negativity. If you go and read social forums like reddit r/latvia, many posters come across as critical and judgemental.

*Takes off the hat"

The facts speak for themselves. I read recently that in 1950 USA was 90% Caucasian/White and now it is 60% Caucasian/White. (Correct me if you can!). It has nothing to do with racism. It has to do with the fact that government has been letting in immigrants for 70+ years and it has been the default policy.

Back in my day in 1990s to get a Green Visa for USA you had to be a valuable professional in a field USA needed workers. IT, electrical engineering, aeronautics etc. Nowadays immigration law is different.

From my close circle my mom's friend who is an English teacher married a guy from USA and has been living in Arizona for past 10+ years. She is a lady in 60s now, still teaches English, pays all the taxes. Her son finished trade school in USA and also works there. They have adapted nicely.
 
Illegal immigration not an issue in NZ or refugees. No problem.

We had 25% pop growth between 2002-2017 iirc. House prices went through the rook, shortages of specialists relative to increased numbers.

What's going in in America etc well that's us last 7 years or so. Add 50% to your house prices to get a rough idea how bad it got here.

Immigrants itself hasn't been an issue but CoL has been. Labour campaigned on cheaper prices 2017, failed hard almost got the boot but Covid changed things.

People complain about prices but relative to wages most things aren't bad. Relative to what you have left after rent/mortgage it's bad atm espicially with recession and idiots in charge.

Doesn't effect us personally that much but we got in the door just after the GFC. Mortgage paid off in 10 years.

Young people are screwed though unless you're from a well off back ground. Prices peaked 2021 and dollar has gone kaput but at one point it was around 700k usd average house price. Come down slightly but dollars gone to crap.
 
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Wow, from zero to replacement theory in one post bloody hell

If that's aimed at me I only included the actual numbers draw your own conclusions.
Nice strawman.

At that rate it would take another 51 years approx but is a waste of time extrapolating that far ahead.

Hit 4 million 2003, 5.2 million 2023.

Highest per capita population growth in OECD afaik.
 
There are rational arguments for tempering immigration, but I suspect the motivation for most anti-immigration people is racist/xenophobic in origin, even if they don't want to admit it. Once you start citing ethnic percentages or leeches on the dole, you enter dog-whistle territory (or really air-raid-siren territory). The "foreign savage" take is globally common and somehow applied to anyone from anywhere. There should be a cognitive hint somewhere in this process where you realize that if you're seen as a foreign savage to people from one country, you might have an issue seeing them as a foreign savage in yours. It's intellectually uncurious to double down and insist the demographic you're targeting really is the Spoiled Criminal Element Hellbent On Wiping Us Out.

It makes it difficult to have a genuine conversation about immigration. The motives are just so wildly different. I'm of the mind that immigration should be slowed in Canada, but my reasoning extends strictly to a question of service load. The government is failing miserably at expanding infrastructure to support the current population, so accepting greater numbers adds stress to a system already beyond its limits. This is not an immigration problem but a government-for-the-people problem. Slowing immigration only "buys time," in the sense that the overwhelming stress load is a little less extreme so that the current population sees improvements faster and more effectively. This is also why I don't care for generic "fewer immigrants!" arguments, as they do nothing to address the core identified issue and only feed into xenophobic mindsets.

My personal preference is for immigration to become significantly easier and for borders to become less strict. But this requires a world that currently does not exist. In the meantime, I think there should be a lot of pressure put on governments to truly support their people, which entails massive expansions of public services. That takes time, so it makes sense to stem the flow of additional people for a while as that happens. A "give us 5 or 10 years to catch up a little" deal. If you add 20 doctors to address a shortage of 40 doctors, that 50% improvement becomes less endearing if you also added enough population to require an extra 10 doctors. You can ease some of that with specialization when accepting immigrants (though I fundamentally despise the idea that immigrants should only be specialists), but you still need the hospitals, the clinics, the expanded med school classes, the public transit, the community services, and so on. It's a little easier to address all this if you cool it a little on growth for a bit.

But no government seems interested in doing any of that. All you ever hear about are the Terrible Immigrants and how they're ruining our Fine (White) Society. It's obnoxious. It's also why I never participate in any anti-immigration thing or add public support to any kind of petition/effort toward that aim because I know that their motivation is not my motivation, and helping them does not get me what I want.
 
It has been said that immigration is one of the key issues that drove Trump's election victory in the USA. The average Joe is worried about it. The Dems didn't adopt a hardline position towards the border soon enough. Some people on OT bang on it's importance as well.

What do the polls say? Well, nearly half of U.S. adults say legal immigration into the United States should be kept at present levels. Overall, according the Pew survey, more adults in the US support increasing immigration (30%) over decreasing immigration (22%).

"But how can that be??" the anti-immigration folks on OT might ask. Are these respondents all bougie posers?

Maybe, in a way? I used to work in the research and polling industry, and what people think is the 'right' answer may influence their response (social desirability bias), especially when the question is phrased in ways that encourage it. If you ask people whether murder is acceptable, for example, I suspect the likelihood is people would answer "no" even if the victim is someone extremely evil. We've all been taught murder is unacceptable. It's one of the basic tenets of social living that's been drilled into us. But does that mean we don't feel that such a victim deserved it?

I've personally witnessed how people start off being PC in a qualitative study (focus groups), where I had the opportunity to dig deeper, before they eventually abandon that after finding out they have agreement from their peers. So, yes, maybe respondents are being bougie and woke (because that's a certifiably bougie thing, something the true salt of the earth would never be).

I'm inclined to believe that immigration is one of those issues which people's feelings might be negative about, but they can perhaps not rationally be too negative about. The negative feelings may be enough to drive people's behaviour, but they may not admit it, at least not openly.

Do you agree? How do you feel people's attitudes are towards immigration in your country, and are those reflected in what they say in polite company?

You quote a survey about attitudes to legal immigration, and conflate that with immigration more generally.

A survey on legal immigration is of questionable value in assessing people's attitudes towards illegal immigration.

And I rather think that for the USA election, positions on the border were more about illegal immigration.
 
You quote a survey about attitudes to legal immigration, and conflate that with immigration more generally.

A survey on legal immigration is of questionable value in assessing people's attitudes towards illegal immigration.

And I rather think that for the USA election, positions on the border were more about illegal immigration.
Is it only about illegal immigration?

Btw, here's a poll about illegal immigration. 64% of Americans say undocumented immigrants should have a way to stay in the country legally, among them 79% say undocumented immigrants must pass a security background check, while 52% say undocumented immigrants should be required to have a job. These are the only requirements with majority agreeing, and these don't seem to be earth-shattering requirements by any means, which I believe the vast majority of undocumented immigrants would meet.

Weird, huh?
 
There are rational arguments for tempering immigration, but I suspect the motivation for most anti-immigration people is racist/xenophobic in origin, even if they don't want to admit it. Once you start citing ethnic percentages or leeches on the dole, you enter dog-whistle territory (or really air-raid-siren territory). The "foreign savage" take is globally common and somehow applied to anyone from anywhere. There should be a cognitive hint somewhere in this process where you realize that if you're seen as a foreign savage to people from one country, you might have an issue seeing them as a foreign savage in yours. It's intellectually uncurious to double down and insist the demographic you're targeting really is the Spoiled Criminal Element Hellbent On Wiping Us Out.

It makes it difficult to have a genuine conversation about immigration. The motives are just so wildly different. I'm of the mind that immigration should be slowed in Canada, but my reasoning extends strictly to a question of service load. The government is failing miserably at expanding infrastructure to support the current population, so accepting greater numbers adds stress to a system already beyond its limits. This is not an immigration problem but a government-for-the-people problem. Slowing immigration only "buys time," in the sense that the overwhelming stress load is a little less extreme so that the current population sees improvements faster and more effectively. This is also why I don't care for generic "fewer immigrants!" arguments, as they do nothing to address the core identified issue and only feed into xenophobic mindsets.

My personal preference is for immigration to become significantly easier and for borders to become less strict. But this requires a world that currently does not exist. In the meantime, I think there should be a lot of pressure put on governments to truly support their people, which entails massive expansions of public services. That takes time, so it makes sense to stem the flow of additional people for a while as that happens. A "give us 5 or 10 years to catch up a little" deal. If you add 20 doctors to address a shortage of 40 doctors, that 50% improvement becomes less endearing if you also added enough population to require an extra 10 doctors. You can ease some of that with specialization when accepting immigrants (though I fundamentally despise the idea that immigrants should only be specialists), but you still need the hospitals, the clinics, the expanded med school classes, the public transit, the community services, and so on. It's a little easier to address all this if you cool it a little on growth for a bit.

But no government seems interested in doing any of that. All you ever hear about are the Terrible Immigrants and how they're ruining our Fine (White) Society. It's obnoxious. It's also why I never participate in any anti-immigration thing or add public support to any kind of petition/effort toward that aim because I know that their motivation is not my motivation, and helping them does not get me what I want.

Yes, there are people who are opposed to more immigration due to prejudices. Personally, I don't care if they come from the Middle East or the Moon. What I care about is that our social programs and housing aren't adequate for the people we have now, and haven't been for decades. When I hear a Syrian refugee whining that the apartment that his family was given doesn't have a private laundry room, it smacks of entitlement and ingratitude at a time when there would be Canadian-born homeless person, even a whole family, who would be grateful to have that apartment, and wouldn't mind sharing the laundry room like most apartment dwellers have to in this country.

Canadians of Convenience annoy me. If you're going to immigrate to this country, do it with the intention to stay and actually become Canadian - accepting the responsibilities along with the benefits. Some years ago one of my home care workers mentioned that she was studying for her citizenship test. I was glad to know she wanted to be a citizen, rather than someone temporary (aka TFW or temporary foreign worker), and when she said there were a couple of things that confused her, I was able to explain it. I don't know how she did on her test, but she should have been able to pass it. She had most of the rest of it down.

Of course there's always the flip side. There shouldn't be so many immigrants working as taxi drivers if they're trained for skilled jobs that we need. The government has got to get a move on in straightening out their paperwork and credentials to work in the area they're trained in, or why should they bother coming here in the first place? Ideally the only thing that might still need time to work out is English proficiency (or French, if they're in Quebec). But knowledge doesn't evaporate from a person's mind just because they've crossed a line on a map.
 
I find funny how the people who typically are very very vocal about defending identity, and how someone's culture should be respected and the like, manage to completely lose any ability to process these concepts as soon as it applies to immigration.
 
Is it only about illegal immigration?

Btw, here's a poll about illegal immigration. 64% of Americans say undocumented immigrants should have a way to stay in the country legally, among them 79% say undocumented immigrants must pass a security background check, while 52% say undocumented immigrants should be required to have a job. These are the only requirements with majority agreeing, and these don't seem to be earth-shattering requirements by any means, which I believe the vast majority of undocumented immigrants would meet.

Weird, huh?

Thank you.

Your last quoted article includes the following:

Americans hold complex views on what should happen to undocumented immigrants. As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to ramp up mass deportations, about
three-quarters of U.S. adults say they are at least somewhat concerned about the number of immigrants entering the country illegally, and a majority support enforcing mass deportation.

I interpret this as meaning that the majority of US adults believe that the undocumented immigrants should be given the opportunity to be judged as genuine
refugees and/or demonstrate years of employment and conformance to law, or whatever; but if they can not do that, then mass deportations are appropriate.

I don't see this as at all weird.
 
Thank you.

Your last quoted article includes the following:



I interpret this as meaning that the majority of US adults believe that the undocumented immigrants should be given the opportunity to be judged as genuine
refugees and/or demonstrate years of employment and conformance to law, or whatever; but if they can not do that, then mass deportations are appropriate.

I don't see this as at all weird.
It's weird because if you see it in that context, it seems like such a small issue. "Illegal immigrants should have a clean record and a job" doesn't really match up with "I want mass deportations." Because who would be this "mass" being deported?

And if immigration was a big election issue, this can't be the extent of it.
 
Most polls have closed answers and can not deal with the complexities of conditional answers.

Or in other words, the weirdness arises from the granularity of the sampling.
 
Most polls have closed answers and can not deal with the complexities of conditional answers.

Or in other words, the weirdness arises from the granularity of the sampling.
Not sure what you mean by "the granularity of the sampling," but I believe this is covered in the OP, and I attributed the underlying causes to question phrasing and social desirability bias. It's easier to say "I don't like illegal immigration, it's illegal" than to say "Kick all illegal immigrants out even if they are fine, contributing members of society". The latter makes one seem like an *******.
 
I find funny how the people who typically are very very vocal about defending identity, and how someone's culture should be respected and the like, manage to completely lose any ability to process these concepts as soon as it applies to immigration.
What does this mean
 
Yeah, that's a problem. Insofar as we want a nation that people believe can do things with laws. But context context. 15 indifferent people (not wanting to take a position associated with being attacked as a racist, so you'd seem to say and so society would demonstrate) aren't worth half thier number plus zeal. They can change the election just by staying home when they don't always. And they did.

Bonus hilarity for today pointing out high sustained levels of immigration cause social strain must be a dogwhistle for white supremacy. Can we get an amen against the evils of colonialism alongside? Or is our lens too... limited for that?

I mean, hell. Even the mayor of NYC gets credit on the Assclown side for simply saying. "This is really expensive, we need more help than we're getting." Then they'll take his side, the mayor of NYC, on assumptions of corruption charges possibly being politically punative.
 
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Here in Canada even just 5 years ago it was unheard of to imagine that a significant % of the country would be against immigration. We're a country of immigrants and used to be proud of it.

These days everything from high home prices to high egg prices to "nobody can find a job" to the worsening driving standards on our roads are being blamed on immigrants. Even our left-leaning parties have begun to pivot away from the current immigration levels and have begun to make it tougher for international students to come and stay here. A majority of Canadians agree that the federal government's immigration plans were a huge failure, but this sort of sentiment goes way beyond that. It's a bit strange for us to have done this 180 degree turnaround in terms of how we view immigrants. It's a bit wild. Even recent immigrants are against the levels of immigration we are still seeing today.

Our high housing and rental costs have no doubt many completely unrelated reasons. These prices will never go back down, not if we completely stop immigrants from coming here, not if we build 500,000 new homes in the next 10 years.

But it's so easy to brainwash people and convince them that there are very simple answers to very complex problems. Yep, it's all the fault of immigrants. Many people buy it and move on. Nope, it can't possibly be the corporations that pretty much run Canada that have put us in this situation. Gotta be the immigrants.
 
US skepticism on immigration has three streams: economic concerns, status quo bias, and xenophobes.

Concern one: overload on services, roads, often skepticism on wages, housing markets.

Concerns two and three are often conflate and end up looking almost equivalent functionally, but there is a slight difference. Some people just don't want any change, thinking it always bites. The village of 100 people in which they know everyone is something they want to remain as it is. This is not strictly racist: they really don't want anyone new, but it's not tenable to deny citizens the right to move there. They can express preference via the new citizens allowed in, though.

And racists, whose motives need no explanation.

Europe, they define their identities a little differently over there, and seem to have much greater difficulty in assimilation consequently.
 
Def def definitively not tenable to object to being colonized by wankers.
 
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