Whenever people try to argue immigrants aren't a net cost they usually use these tricks:
1) Disproportionally count prime age working years. Pretend they never one day need a pension or have to have their kids educated.
2) Call the descendants of immigrants natives (as a technical question of citizenship in a birthright citizenship country this is true, but we all know its trying to hide the ball).
3) Mix high end immigrant groups in with low end immigrant groups, when we all know its the low end immigrant groups people are worried about.
4) Only count the most direct costs. Ignore things like that they pay $X towards education expense when the state spends $Y educating their children where $Y > $X.
The most obvious answer is that the performance of any immigrant group will probably resemble the performance of natives with similar average IQ. If your way off from that, somebody is playing with the numbers.
Wow! How clearly written… Imagine if this was front page and someone saw these numbers… Instead same handful that watch FNC and listen to talk radio, the literate ones will be exposed… But the entire world not just an esoteric subset (Kamela Harris) world watches ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and reads NY Times and WAPO
Old news… Goes back to late 70s early 80s… Daimler Benz importing Turkish labor etc…
Same issues growing in intensity with larger populations not assimilating… Immigrants permitted to demand their cultural norms… Same norms requiring their seeking work, security, civilization, welfare in West…
Same issues never obtaining relative importance in news… Systematically intentionally ignored for half a century
Same issue in 1975 as will be in 2025… Complete takeover by activist, socialist, propagandist press… A press brainwashed by complete takeover by radical liberal Marxists schools… Liberals controlling nearly 100% of speech… TV, Print, Movies, Music, Big Tech, throttling reality more year after year… Marxist propaganda Anaconda… Fear of not getting a raise, losing a job, fear of loosing customers in boycott, fear of being called racist or un woke and being unwelcome socially at the market, private school or country club
Great story… Bet there is a similar one, early 80s Germany and the author was called a Fascist, an extremely bad apple in today’s basket of deplorable
This data is misleading in that many of the “less remunerative” nationalities of immigrant do the hard physical work that allows Danes and “more remunerative” immigrants to hold high-end jobs. Poor immigrants slaughter Denmark’s pigs and pick its fruit and vegetables so the creative class can focus on Danish design. Poor immigrants take care of Denmark’s elderly so their children and grandchildren can build and show PowerPoints to their consultant clients. Just because immigrants work in low wage jobs doesn’t mean they have no value to the society.
Japan has essentially zero immigrants, and yet it grows food, takes care of its elderly, and raises children. One could come up with plenty of other examples in many places.
In the absence of subsidized (via state welfare and services) low value labor people just adapt. They automate restaurants more rather than have excessive staff. Family takes care of its own parents and children rather than shoving them into some factory daycare.
Immigration distorts the incentive structure because it presents people with "cheap" labor that isn't actually cheap. It's paid for by the state indirectly.
It's not unlike how people say carbon emissions have negative externalities and want to impose a carbon tax to internalize those externalities.
There's no way to automate scrubbing toilets or clearing/cleaning a table of plates or picking strawberries (apples yes but not soft fruits that bruise easily).
There are a lot of immigrants in Japan doing the dirty work just like everywhere else. They're not that visible because they're often immigrants from other Asian countries. They're often from Vietnam, Philippines, or Indonesia. They usually have darker complexion than the North East Asians.
Advocating zero immigration even for no skill labor just means that you're outsourcing the labor to another country where you import the product. E.g., you don't want migrants picking strawberries in your country so there are no strawberry farms. You have to buy all your strawberries from Portugal where there are migrants picking them. The problem just shifted somewhere else and you're supporting the migrants in Portugal by buying and eating their strawberries. How do you like them strawberries?
Are you really advocating becoming entirely dependent on another country for food supply? Like becoming dependent on Russian gas?
You've got it all wrong, my friend. You're basing this on a false premise; there are not " a lot of immigrants in Japan ... just like everywhere else". There are, however, Japanese people doing the dirty work. Let the problem shift elsewhere, this is an issue about loving your country and wanting it not be detrimented. This is an issue with, looking from a business perspective, what would the country specifically benefit in financially, i.e., by looking at a net financial positive contribution, and who fits that perfectly? Natives and western immigrants. By the way, no one's advocating for being dependent on Russian gas -- it is better to have both, with a priority on one own country's exports to thereby ultimately export more than one imports.
The fact that MENAPT immigrants aren’t qualified for jobs above menial labor does not signal virtue, nor does it force us to forgive their criminality.
You can just look at Norway or Iceland to see what happens without significant immigrant labor.
Prices rise. Natives do the menial work, but only for extra money. Also, less menial work overall is done; pig farming may get gradually outsourced to abroad, and restaurants add electronic ordering screens.
I don’t know if the Danish government accurately measured the deflationary impact of migrants. Guessing not. But it should be noted that high-skill workers also produce positive externalities that are probably not captured in a simple income analysis.
Did you read the entire second half of the article where it talks about crime? You can have immigration without increased criminal behavior. One needs to accept the crime statistics and formulate a policy based on that.
You're making up your own thesis that has nothing to do with the article. A law abiding migrant janitor that does not commit crime is a net positive for Denmark. A migrant warehouse laborer in prison for raping women is a net negative for Denmark.
It's not about migrants doing jobs that Danes will not do, it's about their overall financial and criminal contribution to Danish society.
If you combine the thesis of this article with what you're arguing, Denmark should be accepting more immigrants from Philippines and Indonesia who do the "dirty work" while at the same time do not commit crimes. And deport all the Somalians and the people from Muslim countries. Are you for this?
You don't get it. Societies do not run on consultants alone. Other people cannot be "net-positive contributors to the country's exchequer" unless someone else is working a low-wage job that makes them a "net-negative" when health care, etc. is added into the equation.
You are the one that doesn’t “get it” Jesper. Society isn’t about wage inflation’s impact on the manager, artist and investor classes. It’s about providing safety and meaning to its constituents. Families and relationships are the main driving forces. All else is naught. Instead of wasting time on social media, smoking North African hash or grinding on video games there are people that can and would fill those roles at a market clearing wage (plus labor saving technologies and techniques as others have posited). The rate for that labor would go up, yes, and the take home pay from your consulting gig at Accenture on The Devil’s Island would be materially lowered. Domestic pig farmers should be embraced regardless. Swine was a holy animal in Scandinavia, after all, and makes up several national dishes. This does not begin to mention… When rapes are committed in extreme disproportion by those of Muslim origin it becomes glaringly obvious that the shawarma is not worth the squeeze. Pause to think (and feel!) of all the girls and women that have been brutally sexually assaulted at the hand of such a venal perspective. That could have been you.
No. We have these things called labor saving devices. They do the work that you used to need a strong back for. They just keep getting better and better.
Do I really need to have a waiter come and get my drinks, take my order, bring it out, wait for the check, pay the check, wait for the check to come back, etc?
Or can I just order off a screen, maybe even have it brought to me on a conveyer belt, and pay on the same screen without all that back and forth check nonsense. See, the "low wage worker" was completely superfluous.
Another example, my friend builds the robots that make amazon warehouses run. A low wage worker, in fact many such workers, used to do the drudgery that the robot does. It turns out we didn't actually need that labor at all.
People doing low value menial tasks are not the backbone of the economy and they could easily be replaced with automation. Importing more low value labor is absolutely bonkers.
Even assuming you are right about the net contributions, it absolutely does not excuse the abnormally high crime rates from MNAPT countries. That is the most shocking data to me, and no doubt drags down the net economical contributions considerably. Hard to pick fruit or clean toilets when you are in prison for rape. Prisoner cost per day in Denmark is 183€. That’s 66,795€ per year. The only thing that is contributing to is a high tax rate on consultants so that criminals can be rehabilitated.
Plain and simple, immigrants are a burden both for the economy and society, since only some of them truly came there to work and prosper, the rest are there to play dirty and grab free cash from government. If we don't put a stop to it, then they will use the locals in most terrible ways. This will not work out because some people need to be educated and controlled daily in order to be a part of society and to become a part of it with heart and soul. Few generations isn't going to be enough, considering Europe is accepting refugees in milions, while a country such as Denmark has room for maybe 50 thousand of people for few years in order to educate them properly so they blend in.
Some arguments for immigration that are also interesting: There are that many uses of tax money are non excludable, like spending money on the military. If one added many more immigrants only some costs would go up such as welfare spending, but roads, the military, government bureaucracy all would not cost more.
Another argument is that when immigrants are employed they are helping the economy even if they are a drain on taxes. If you have some janitor that will get more welfare and pension money than he pays in taxes over his life, he is still helping the economy by doing his job and he might well be beneficial to the Danisch economy on net.
It would be interesting (if possible) to see the crime stats adjusted for wealth level. At least in the US, that seems to have a notable impact on crime rates. I.e.: poor people of any race commit more crime.
"MENAPT" is a weirder term than "MENA". Pakistan may be a Muslim country, but it's South Asian and more sensibly lumped in with Bangladesh than any part of Africa.
What about the economic effect of comparative advantage in labor? Less educated/low-IQ immigrants pay less income tax in low-wage jobs because it's progressive, but free up higher-IQ natives to do higher-value, better-paid work that adds tax revenue. This should be accounted for.
Reading this and examining the graphs provided, it would be interesting, given the data summaries recently provided at https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/africans-violence-and-genetics, and the archeologically-anthropologically-genetically-supported theory that humans prehistorically originated in Africa, to compare modern-day ethnic crime rates in Denmark to the prehistoric migration distances from Africa to the countries of origin of these modern day immigrants. Offhand, it generally seems the farther from motherland Africa an immigrant of a given original nationality came from, the less offensive and more productive is that modern immigrant to Denmark. Maybe there's something of a prehistoric violence gradient -- reaching maximum value in mother Africa and minimum value in far-flung places like Japan and the US -- that explains much of the varying modern national character with regard to crime and productivity being demonstrated in modern Denmark. A model of chromatographic, progressive elimination (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatography) of genetic traits promoting recourse to violence controlled by the length of prehistoric migration routes away from mother Africa comes to mind.
nice Analysis, but it lumps together in "Other" groups from south america, east europe and south/east asia. In the case of south/east asia (from india to the right) usually have very low crime and high earnings jobs, these are the ideal immigrants, but the analysis doesn't points at all. In the case of south america and east europe is varied. I'm from south america I would only recommend my country Uruguay and Argentina really. But you can do smart immigration, what is not addressed in the analysis is that old people commit less crime, but they also don't work, correcting by age makes no sense if you end up with a super safe country of old people and the entire economy collapses. Normalizing by age assumes there is future generation of danish replacing the current, and that is the problem in the first place.
"Along with age composition, they also control for various familial socioeconomic indicators."
I don't even think that this is appropriate. If immigrants have poor socioeconomics because they are immigrants and they do crime because they are poor, they do crime because they are immigrants. Adjusting for socioeconomic simply "accounts for" one of the things we are trying to measure.
Whenever people try to argue immigrants aren't a net cost they usually use these tricks:
1) Disproportionally count prime age working years. Pretend they never one day need a pension or have to have their kids educated.
2) Call the descendants of immigrants natives (as a technical question of citizenship in a birthright citizenship country this is true, but we all know its trying to hide the ball).
3) Mix high end immigrant groups in with low end immigrant groups, when we all know its the low end immigrant groups people are worried about.
4) Only count the most direct costs. Ignore things like that they pay $X towards education expense when the state spends $Y educating their children where $Y > $X.
The most obvious answer is that the performance of any immigrant group will probably resemble the performance of natives with similar average IQ. If your way off from that, somebody is playing with the numbers.
Water is wet.
Wow! How clearly written… Imagine if this was front page and someone saw these numbers… Instead same handful that watch FNC and listen to talk radio, the literate ones will be exposed… But the entire world not just an esoteric subset (Kamela Harris) world watches ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and reads NY Times and WAPO
Old news… Goes back to late 70s early 80s… Daimler Benz importing Turkish labor etc…
Same issues growing in intensity with larger populations not assimilating… Immigrants permitted to demand their cultural norms… Same norms requiring their seeking work, security, civilization, welfare in West…
Same issues never obtaining relative importance in news… Systematically intentionally ignored for half a century
Same issue in 1975 as will be in 2025… Complete takeover by activist, socialist, propagandist press… A press brainwashed by complete takeover by radical liberal Marxists schools… Liberals controlling nearly 100% of speech… TV, Print, Movies, Music, Big Tech, throttling reality more year after year… Marxist propaganda Anaconda… Fear of not getting a raise, losing a job, fear of loosing customers in boycott, fear of being called racist or un woke and being unwelcome socially at the market, private school or country club
Great story… Bet there is a similar one, early 80s Germany and the author was called a Fascist, an extremely bad apple in today’s basket of deplorable
doesnt matter if the inferior non whites cost the danes 45 trillion an hour they will not stop the invasion
This data is misleading in that many of the “less remunerative” nationalities of immigrant do the hard physical work that allows Danes and “more remunerative” immigrants to hold high-end jobs. Poor immigrants slaughter Denmark’s pigs and pick its fruit and vegetables so the creative class can focus on Danish design. Poor immigrants take care of Denmark’s elderly so their children and grandchildren can build and show PowerPoints to their consultant clients. Just because immigrants work in low wage jobs doesn’t mean they have no value to the society.
This is nonsense.
Japan has essentially zero immigrants, and yet it grows food, takes care of its elderly, and raises children. One could come up with plenty of other examples in many places.
In the absence of subsidized (via state welfare and services) low value labor people just adapt. They automate restaurants more rather than have excessive staff. Family takes care of its own parents and children rather than shoving them into some factory daycare.
Immigration distorts the incentive structure because it presents people with "cheap" labor that isn't actually cheap. It's paid for by the state indirectly.
It's not unlike how people say carbon emissions have negative externalities and want to impose a carbon tax to internalize those externalities.
There's no way to automate scrubbing toilets or clearing/cleaning a table of plates or picking strawberries (apples yes but not soft fruits that bruise easily).
There are a lot of immigrants in Japan doing the dirty work just like everywhere else. They're not that visible because they're often immigrants from other Asian countries. They're often from Vietnam, Philippines, or Indonesia. They usually have darker complexion than the North East Asians.
Advocating zero immigration even for no skill labor just means that you're outsourcing the labor to another country where you import the product. E.g., you don't want migrants picking strawberries in your country so there are no strawberry farms. You have to buy all your strawberries from Portugal where there are migrants picking them. The problem just shifted somewhere else and you're supporting the migrants in Portugal by buying and eating their strawberries. How do you like them strawberries?
Are you really advocating becoming entirely dependent on another country for food supply? Like becoming dependent on Russian gas?
You've got it all wrong, my friend. You're basing this on a false premise; there are not " a lot of immigrants in Japan ... just like everywhere else". There are, however, Japanese people doing the dirty work. Let the problem shift elsewhere, this is an issue about loving your country and wanting it not be detrimented. This is an issue with, looking from a business perspective, what would the country specifically benefit in financially, i.e., by looking at a net financial positive contribution, and who fits that perfectly? Natives and western immigrants. By the way, no one's advocating for being dependent on Russian gas -- it is better to have both, with a priority on one own country's exports to thereby ultimately export more than one imports.
Wrong
https://youtu.be/hWemeervqhA?si=ltD3ec2pIqFSOD7a
The fact that MENAPT immigrants aren’t qualified for jobs above menial labor does not signal virtue, nor does it force us to forgive their criminality.
The ability to earn a high wage does not signal virtue either. Society requires "menial" labor to function, and the Danes aren't gonna do it.
You can just look at Norway or Iceland to see what happens without significant immigrant labor.
Prices rise. Natives do the menial work, but only for extra money. Also, less menial work overall is done; pig farming may get gradually outsourced to abroad, and restaurants add electronic ordering screens.
I don’t know if the Danish government accurately measured the deflationary impact of migrants. Guessing not. But it should be noted that high-skill workers also produce positive externalities that are probably not captured in a simple income analysis.
Did you read the entire second half of the article where it talks about crime? You can have immigration without increased criminal behavior. One needs to accept the crime statistics and formulate a policy based on that.
You're making up your own thesis that has nothing to do with the article. A law abiding migrant janitor that does not commit crime is a net positive for Denmark. A migrant warehouse laborer in prison for raping women is a net negative for Denmark.
It's not about migrants doing jobs that Danes will not do, it's about their overall financial and criminal contribution to Danish society.
If you combine the thesis of this article with what you're arguing, Denmark should be accepting more immigrants from Philippines and Indonesia who do the "dirty work" while at the same time do not commit crimes. And deport all the Somalians and the people from Muslim countries. Are you for this?
I'm guessing that Danes held high-end jobs prior to the arrival of these immigrants.
You don't get it. Societies do not run on consultants alone. Other people cannot be "net-positive contributors to the country's exchequer" unless someone else is working a low-wage job that makes them a "net-negative" when health care, etc. is added into the equation.
You are the one that doesn’t “get it” Jesper. Society isn’t about wage inflation’s impact on the manager, artist and investor classes. It’s about providing safety and meaning to its constituents. Families and relationships are the main driving forces. All else is naught. Instead of wasting time on social media, smoking North African hash or grinding on video games there are people that can and would fill those roles at a market clearing wage (plus labor saving technologies and techniques as others have posited). The rate for that labor would go up, yes, and the take home pay from your consulting gig at Accenture on The Devil’s Island would be materially lowered. Domestic pig farmers should be embraced regardless. Swine was a holy animal in Scandinavia, after all, and makes up several national dishes. This does not begin to mention… When rapes are committed in extreme disproportion by those of Muslim origin it becomes glaringly obvious that the shawarma is not worth the squeeze. Pause to think (and feel!) of all the girls and women that have been brutally sexually assaulted at the hand of such a venal perspective. That could have been you.
No. We have these things called labor saving devices. They do the work that you used to need a strong back for. They just keep getting better and better.
Do I really need to have a waiter come and get my drinks, take my order, bring it out, wait for the check, pay the check, wait for the check to come back, etc?
Or can I just order off a screen, maybe even have it brought to me on a conveyer belt, and pay on the same screen without all that back and forth check nonsense. See, the "low wage worker" was completely superfluous.
Another example, my friend builds the robots that make amazon warehouses run. A low wage worker, in fact many such workers, used to do the drudgery that the robot does. It turns out we didn't actually need that labor at all.
People doing low value menial tasks are not the backbone of the economy and they could easily be replaced with automation. Importing more low value labor is absolutely bonkers.
Even assuming you are right about the net contributions, it absolutely does not excuse the abnormally high crime rates from MNAPT countries. That is the most shocking data to me, and no doubt drags down the net economical contributions considerably. Hard to pick fruit or clean toilets when you are in prison for rape. Prisoner cost per day in Denmark is 183€. That’s 66,795€ per year. The only thing that is contributing to is a high tax rate on consultants so that criminals can be rehabilitated.
Plain and simple, immigrants are a burden both for the economy and society, since only some of them truly came there to work and prosper, the rest are there to play dirty and grab free cash from government. If we don't put a stop to it, then they will use the locals in most terrible ways. This will not work out because some people need to be educated and controlled daily in order to be a part of society and to become a part of it with heart and soul. Few generations isn't going to be enough, considering Europe is accepting refugees in milions, while a country such as Denmark has room for maybe 50 thousand of people for few years in order to educate them properly so they blend in.
That's pretty much it, plain and simple. The same phenomenon is observed in most western european countries.
I had come across a snippet of this data (these data) a while ago in the Economist. This analysis here is more in depth.
Now, are there grounds to believe the situation being any different in other European countries?
The situation elsewhere is the same, based on the racial makeup of natives and foreigners
It's likely not as bad in the UK as immigrants have higher rates of employment. The rest of Europe is probably very similar.
These data suggest the best approach would be to allow only women in, as gender disparities in crime blow away disparities from ethnic origin.
Another well presented set of statistics. I discuss historical reasons for these patterns here.
https://helendale.substack.com/p/migration-as-social-imperial-project
Good article.
Some arguments for immigration that are also interesting: There are that many uses of tax money are non excludable, like spending money on the military. If one added many more immigrants only some costs would go up such as welfare spending, but roads, the military, government bureaucracy all would not cost more.
Another argument is that when immigrants are employed they are helping the economy even if they are a drain on taxes. If you have some janitor that will get more welfare and pension money than he pays in taxes over his life, he is still helping the economy by doing his job and he might well be beneficial to the Danisch economy on net.
It would be interesting (if possible) to see the crime stats adjusted for wealth level. At least in the US, that seems to have a notable impact on crime rates. I.e.: poor people of any race commit more crime.
"MENAPT" is a weirder term than "MENA". Pakistan may be a Muslim country, but it's South Asian and more sensibly lumped in with Bangladesh than any part of Africa.
What about the economic effect of comparative advantage in labor? Less educated/low-IQ immigrants pay less income tax in low-wage jobs because it's progressive, but free up higher-IQ natives to do higher-value, better-paid work that adds tax revenue. This should be accounted for.
Reading this and examining the graphs provided, it would be interesting, given the data summaries recently provided at https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/africans-violence-and-genetics, and the archeologically-anthropologically-genetically-supported theory that humans prehistorically originated in Africa, to compare modern-day ethnic crime rates in Denmark to the prehistoric migration distances from Africa to the countries of origin of these modern day immigrants. Offhand, it generally seems the farther from motherland Africa an immigrant of a given original nationality came from, the less offensive and more productive is that modern immigrant to Denmark. Maybe there's something of a prehistoric violence gradient -- reaching maximum value in mother Africa and minimum value in far-flung places like Japan and the US -- that explains much of the varying modern national character with regard to crime and productivity being demonstrated in modern Denmark. A model of chromatographic, progressive elimination (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatography) of genetic traits promoting recourse to violence controlled by the length of prehistoric migration routes away from mother Africa comes to mind.
nice Analysis, but it lumps together in "Other" groups from south america, east europe and south/east asia. In the case of south/east asia (from india to the right) usually have very low crime and high earnings jobs, these are the ideal immigrants, but the analysis doesn't points at all. In the case of south america and east europe is varied. I'm from south america I would only recommend my country Uruguay and Argentina really. But you can do smart immigration, what is not addressed in the analysis is that old people commit less crime, but they also don't work, correcting by age makes no sense if you end up with a super safe country of old people and the entire economy collapses. Normalizing by age assumes there is future generation of danish replacing the current, and that is the problem in the first place.
"Along with age composition, they also control for various familial socioeconomic indicators."
I don't even think that this is appropriate. If immigrants have poor socioeconomics because they are immigrants and they do crime because they are poor, they do crime because they are immigrants. Adjusting for socioeconomic simply "accounts for" one of the things we are trying to measure.
You should read the footnote I associated with that paragraph :)
Yep, guess I should have :P