alt Hacker NewsThere is another way to go about this. Statistically immigrants from Latin America have lower crime rates than the average American. It is possible to increase population AND decrease the crime rate by allowing immigrants into the country.
Personally, as someone with capital, having people who also work hard for less salary is beneficial. Most native born Americans are much poorer than I am so I understand their fear of the competition. Nonetheless, for me immigration is a great way to increase the population.
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The US isn't that attractive for white collar Latin Americans either. For example, the kind of Mexican who can get a job at Google MTV or ATX would also be able to work at Reddit CDMX for around $80k-$100k TC or McKinsey CDMX for $130k-160k TC.
Even for blue collar immigrants working undocumented in the US, a large portion were formerly lower middle class before the states they lived in either failed (eg. Venezuela) or quasi-failed (eg. El Salvador, Honduras).
I remember seeing a similar trend as a kid - we used to see plenty of college educated Mexicans and Argentinians Engineers working blue collar jobs in California because of both their economic crises. When the worst of their economic crises ended, those that didn't naturalize chose to move back to the old country.
The “average crime rate” argument is disingenuous for an analogous reason to Waymo reporting that their cars are safer than the average driver is disingenuous: it lumps me in with Doris who last passed her vision test a decade ago but now has two cataracts. It also ignores that crimes in immigrant communities are less likely to be reported in the first place.
It's a band aid. Sure, first gen immigrants may have more children than locals, but then their children are locals, and they follow the local trend.
Kurgezat video on South Korea fertility explains this.
> Statistically immigrants from Latin America have lower crime rates than the average American. It is possible to increase population AND decrease the crime rate by allowing immigrants into the country.
Except that Latin America also has a fertility rate below population replacement and taking working-aged people from countries that are already in that position is likely to be extremely destabilizing, not to mention unsustainable because it implies those countries would be undergoing long-term depopulation.
We need to figure out why people aren't having more kids everywhere and there's not really anything else for it.