Sounds a lot like what the US has been subcontracting to Mexico.

I've been worrying for a while that this sort of thing is the only politically feasible thing to do. So many voters feel so much discomfort about large numbers of migrants/refugees that no party that openly supports refugees can win or maintain power, in the US or UK or Australia or anywhere in the EU. So the center-left and center-right governing parties need to underhandedly try to stop people from arriving, using methods that surely violate human rights, because otherwise the openly anti-immigrant far right will win and violate the human rights of immigrants and lots of other groups too.

I hate it, obviously, but is there any really successful pro-immigrant political party anywhere in the world at the moment?

To 2. Merkel's CDU allowed about 1M people mostly from Syria into Germany in 2015, reversing a few years of net population loss. Relic of a time lost to contemporary imagination of course, we can only marvel at the stonework and imaginative variety of immigration paperwork left to us.

Who do people think will cook food, write anything, and pay into social security twenty years out? Italy's shrinking, Spain is unchanging since 2010 even with generous (bureaucratically, not economically) immigration terms from latin america and apparently a fabulous Russian mafia immersion program for maybe a fifth of Barcelona.

To 2.last, the coalition agreement of the new German government looks pretty good on these dimensions. But I haven't read any takes by subject matter experts yet.

In particular (I just skimmed the chapter now), the coalition agreement demands decoupling development aid from migration enforcement, and emphasizes that FrontEx needs to respect human rights and be subject to EU Parliamentary control and do marine rescue operations.

Wanting essentially open borders is my least mainstream political position. I don't mind some regulation -- if a country wants to exclude particular individuals for some reason that's fine -- but the amount of legal immigration permitted should correspond at least roughly to the number of people who want to immigrate. In a world where capital can move freely across borders, labor should too.

7: My grandfather - my Dad's dad, not the WASPy Yankee one- was basically a PTO-immigrant Republican. That family settled in upstate New York near Buffalo in the 1830's as farmers.

When he moved out to Arizona, the anti-immigrant sentiment was new to him. He was against "welfare" mostly, but if people wanted to work, he was glad to have immigrants come.

I didn't have a single ancestor here until quite a bit after 1830.

Anyway, I'm all for capital controls. Needed for tax evasion prevention regardless.

There been reports of fuckers standing around trying to stop lifeboats launching into the Channel to rescue drowning refugees but it's not at all clear that these are true. They are all based on one woman ringing in to a lefty talk radio show and most of the people who would have known deny it and say there was only one lorry driver shouting that they should be left to drown.

Still, there is a sizeable constituency, I think for "Let them all drown, providing they do so out of sight". Not necessarily a majority. But enough to tip an election.

It's enough to blow an election out of the water here.

3: Am I totally misremembering, or did letting in all those refugees in 2015 lead to an alarming rise in the popularity of the far right in Germany? And didn't Merkel's government quietly reduce refugee admissions thereafter in response to hostile public opinion?

I think the average voter, or at least a very significant slice of them, cares more about feeling like their culture is going to be overwhelmed by foreigners, than they do about what the labor market or the tax base is going to look like in a couple decades. And, what is morally far worse, they care about keeping foreigners out more than they care about the lives and the suffering of people who are trying to migrate.

I don't want to defend people who have that viewpoint, but I do find it at least comprehensible. And, regardless, I still think it may be politically insurmountable.

6: Open borders is an appealing position, but how does a democratic society maintain a welfare state or a set of liberal public policies if everyone in the rest of the world is free to just come right in?

Most of the ones who show up will get jobs and pay taxes, which is how you support a welfare state. On the liberal public policies, that's a problem with native-born Americans: while immigrants might not be systematically much better, they're probably not going to be off-the-scale worse.

And harking back to the "popularism" discussion from a couple of weeks ago, while I think open borders is good policy both as a matter of justice and for the welfare of the immigrants themselves and the prior citizens of the countries they immigrate to, I recognize that it's incredibly unpopular. I'm not actually expecting any actually existing politician to go along with me on this.

8: They were from Alsace. It looks like there might have been natural disasters that led people to leave.

9: if you're going to restrict the movement of people, you should probably do the same for capital.

2.last: SNP.

The thing is, it looks like even most recent immigrants aren't in favor of more immigration once they are settled in for a bit. Which makes some sense as they are more likely to be competing for jobs with new immigrants than your tenured American.

17: Interesting example, but if I understand correctly, the Scottish government doesn't control anything related to immigration policy, which is a matter for the UK government.

I presume the SNP's popular support is for reasons other than their views on refugees and migrants, and suspect that if Scotland becomes independent, their government will have the same kinds of struggles with popular opinion on refugee and immigration issues that other European governments seem to have.

19 has some truth to it, but it's also just true that the colder anglophone triumvirate of Canada, Scotland, and New Zealand all worry about population decline and all are more pro-immigration than their corresponding larger and strongly anti-immigrant neighbors.

Also anti-immigration in UK is tied to pro-brexit. So you'd expect strongly anti-Brexit parties (SNP, LD) to be more pro-immigration.

If there's no true Scotsman, logically there's no possibility of an immigrant being from an outgroup.

Assuming a really poorly specified dichotomous Scotsman.

21: You'd expect this, but wanting to be in the EU doesn't necessarily entail wanting to let a lot of people from Africa and the Middle East into the EU. Those two issues seemed to get conflated by the pro-Brexit crowd, but they don't have to be.

I like "colder Anglophone triumvirate." A smaller, nicer counterpart of AUKUS.

24: Right, and there are some places where arguments like that had some traction, in particular the argument that the UK should have more English speaking South Asian immigration and less immigration from Romania seemed to have some traction with British Asians. Obviously it's a scam though, the Brexiteers never actually intended to increase immigration from South Asia. But in the Scottish context it seems to me that the SNP = pro-immigration broadly, pro-EU, anti-UK and Tory = anti-immigration broadly, anti-EU, pro-UK split is pretty clean, with shrinking Scottish Labour having people who cut crossways on these issues. Old-school SNP had plenty anti-immigrant types, but you can see from the failure of Alba that most of those people are just Tories now.

That said, although increased immigration from South Asia was largely a scam, the UK genuinely is letting in a large number of Hong Kongers.

25: this may be happening, a bit, although the data is poor quality pending the 2021 census. note the student numbers down-thread https://twitter.com/jdportes/status/1463850606280466439

As for the EUropeans, so far 5.6m of them have applied to settle and 94 per cent have either got it, or got it provisionally waiting for the definitive yes. Very quietly, the government has continued to take applications after the deadline ran out (almost half a million so far); another point that nobody, oddly, is talking about is that the 5.6mn unique applicants are about twice the number of EEA nationals who were thought to be in the UK in 2016 so either there were like three million more people than anyone thought or else a whole bunch of them decided to get in while they could.

***LOON TRIPLE POST***

link for 28: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/eu-settlement-scheme-statistics

LB is right about "In a world where capital can move freely across borders, labor should too."

1. I remember reading many years ago that capital outflows [flight] from Africa vastly exceeded aid inflows. And of course we know that this is the case with all the countries that succeeded in developing too -- they put all their capital in Western central banks, so that they could avoid the dangers of currency crises

2. It's not even clear to me that in a world where capital flight is common, Ricardo's argument that free trade benefits all parties absolutely, is true.

Aid inflows have got to be dwarfed by remittance inflows, no?

Spike: I don't know. But the reason it's relevant that capital outflows are so large, is that if we're going to blame these migrants for coming to the West for a better life, we have to interrogate who is to blame for there being no chance of a better life in their home countries, and at least part of that blame falls on us, for the way we set up international trade.

Sometimes it's because we directly or indirectly overthrew their governments

"I think the average voter, or at least a very significant slice of them, cares more about feeling like their culture is going to be overwhelmed by foreigners, than they do about what the labor market or the tax base is going to look like in a couple decades"

I'm honestly not even sure this is the wrong attitude to take. If your culture is what you think is worthy and unworthy, what actions you applaud and denigrate... it's entirely natural to oppose a situation where the majority of people around you don't share it. Culture gets misused to mean petty issues like clothing and musical styles and cooking preferences, as though there's no other differences worth mentioning - but it's far more fundamental than that.

"Aid inflows have got to be dwarfed by remittance inflows, no?"

Oh, massively. By two orders of magnitude IIRC.