I have a coworker who is vehemently anti-immigrant. One of the reasons she gives for this stance is that they come to this country unvaccinated and spread disease. Guess who is also anti-vax?
THE DUALITY OF MAN, or something
IS THAT SOME KIND OF SICK JOKE!
It’s a hardball world, son. We’ve gotta keep our heads until this peace craze blows over.
YEA
Would never say that in public, he’s a private joker.
The venn diagram is a circle.
Brexit was the best experiment for that. They kick immigrants out so all jobs went to the local population. People didn’t want them, produce was left in the fields, deliveries were not made, tables were not waited on and some companies folded. Anyway, immigration is now back and higher than it used to be, but from other countries.
Don’t forget brain drain!
Wait, so they got rid of the Poles and other Eastern Europeans they loved to hate—who are they importing for labor now?
India, China and Nigeria.
So yeah, that voting for Brexit “to keep our brown people” didn’t turn out like they thought it would.
Illegal immigrants actually pay into state and local taxes way more than legal citizens and green-card holders do.
And since they’re here undocumented, they can’t get anything in return for paying those taxes.
I looked up the numbers a while back but this 2017 study says at least 50%, meaning the majority pay taxes.
https://itep.org/undocumented-immigrants-state-local-tax-contributions-2017/
Also, note that only 59.9% of households pay taxes, which means legal status isn’t that important in terms of whether people pay taxes or not. They also won’t likely get any social security money either.
They pay more huh? That’s some magical shit right there lol
They pay more if you consider that they frequently pay SS with no payout for them.
How does it work btw? Do you come to your country’s tax authority and say “hello, I’m here illegally, can I pay taxes” ?
You file your taxes under a special SSN that begins with a 9 that is given to you by the IRS specifically for filing.
https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/taxpayer-identification-numbers-tin#itin
And you’re not immediately arrested for, like, illegally working or potentially illegally crossing the border to begin with?
Or is it like taxing criminal activity, simply a loophole to make charging them easier?
a) different departments, tax department doesn’t deal with immigration law
b) government likes money more than it likes fairness, as should be obvious looking at… yknow… [gestures generally]
I see, thanks!
Whenever they get a paycheck from a legitimate business, they’re paying into those taxes.
I have SSI it pays peanuts, if I didn’t have a job ontop of it, I’d have nothing.
The rules are overly strict and an absolute poverty trap. I cannot legally have 2000 dollars to my name and anything I earn through ANY means must be reported meaning I CAN’T have a side hustle.
I need to stay on the program because my health insurance is tied to it, if I ever lost it I would be physically and mentally near death within a month.
I’m one of the people they’re talking about when they mention Welfare Queens
Definitely need Medicare for All. This is such BS.
Same with UBI
These are the situations I think it’s fine to fuck the government on. Do an all cash side hustle, keep the cash in a safe deposit box/in your mattress.
Though I suppose there’s the risk you get caught and fucked over by the legal system.
It’s a fucked up situation, and I feel for you. Hopefully things improve.
Only hope is for legislation to ease the rules a bit so that peopel on SSI can actually escape poverty, until then, it’s legally mandated that I live below the poverty line. It’s fucked
It’s a huge part of the culture of generational poverty as well. I used to work in Legal Aid and some of the schemes that folks used to milk the system to illegally (yet understandably) avoid the trap you’re talking about were absolutely brilliant. One couple used domestic protection orders to have a legal paper trail that the male couldn’t legally live with his partner (to avoid “household” income counting as your income). There was zero domestic abuse going on, but the women would lie, get her protection order, and have something to hand to the social service workers. Male partner would sneak in and out to avoid being too obvious that it was a sham. Absolutely brilliant, made it a shame that such smart fraudsters never had a life that gave them a vision and hope for something greater.
Whenever I see people talk about “If I could sit on my ass and get paid I would too!” I tell them the same thing -
Do it.
If you can scam your way into it, more power to you. First you’ll have to spend your savings down under $2k. If you have two cars, gotta sell one. If you take so much as a few hours of work a week your check is nixed like 75%. All for, even in 2023, like $800/mo.
If you think you can live your best life on $800/mo as the type of person who thinks someone getting 800/mo is the reason you can’t get ahead, I support you. 🤷
Right-wing ideology doesn’t have to be consistent - it merely has to shift the blame for society’s ills away from those who caused them.
So, rich people
The short answer is - yes.
The long answer is - also yes.
The long answer is yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees.
The anti-immigrant goons don’t get the Schrödinger reference.
Who cares what they get?
I can think of something I’d like them to get.
Vaccinated?
No a couple of brain cells
I’m not anti immigration but if you want to get into the reference it’s quite possible for two seperate immigrants to be working and taking available jobs and not working while collecting welfare. I don’t need to point out the obvious that immigrants aren’t one entire entity that can only do one thing at a time. There’s obviously instances where immigrants do have an impact on local job availability and there there are instances of immigrants collecting welfare and not working. I don’t need to point out the obvious that there are some instances of immigrants contributing more to the local economy than the local community too. This meme is actually a fairly shallow take on a complex issue, something I would prefer to leave to the bigots
They shouldn’t come here (but they’re necessary to run my Florida landscaping business)!
Mass shootings in the news came up a couple o’ days ago at work. It quickly devolved into it’s all n-words shooting eachother, because that’s what n-words do.
Did you know trump is gonna eliminate the income tax once he’s elected?
I hate being in a red corner of a blue state.
People at your work just drop n-bombs in casual conversation? I’m in Georgia, and even the most inbred rednecks here aren’t bold enough to do that at work.
And yet the mass shooting record holder is a white guy who was shooting at a country music festival ffs…
“Damn whites always shooting each other, because that’s what white people do”
I’m from a country that people wants to immigrate away. Even I do sometimes.
But at the same time I am disturbed by some actions of the minority of the immigrants who come to my country. I am leaning to be an anti-immigrant and because of that I feel hypocritical and xenophobic.
Sometimes I think it is cruel to be against immigrants because people do not choose their place of birth and their family, just like me.
I’m just not sure what is right, and this loop bothers me.
There’s good and bad in every group and race. Just out of curiosity what country are you from. In some countries the news media and people in general will just latch onto anything bad done by migrants. Like in my country, Ireland, there’s been much ado about a couple of cases where immigrants have committed heinous crimes but there’s been very little coverage of the groups that are going around Dublin basically terrorising immigrants.
I guess you are right. I am from Turkiye and our leader, Erdogan is a pro-immigration. It bothers me to agree with him on something :)
Normally I believe in human rights but he accepts undocumented refugees from ME in order to bring the Sharia. So his purpose is not to save those people but change average society habits. I think we are different from European countries in this regard. I think Europe accepts immigrants in a more refined way.
There are absolutely other European countries that handle immigration in one way or another depending of the ruling party’s political goals. There was a relatively recent period of time in Spain where the right wing immediately stopped to casually drop racist remarks against Latin Americans because they realized that Latinos, usually being Christians, were more likely to vote for them, but they still paid lip service to Anti-Arab xenophobia.
For me everything is based on how they get there and how they conduct themselves.
I have been an immigrant to several countries and I still am, but
I had all of the proper paperwork,
I didn’t sneak across any borders illegally,
I didn’t overstay my visas,
I didn’t pay some guy on a boat to bring me there,
I didn’t commit any crimes that are worse than jaywalking,
I didn’t get clumped together with other people from my country and try to impose my values on the citizens of the country I was in,
I didn’t do any under the table work,
I paid all of my taxes.
These are the thing that I expect from others as well.
That’s a lot of words for “I can’t (won’t?) see past my own privilege and have no compassion for people who don’t have the same options I do.”
Then too bad, I don’t have an option to fly into space, yet you won’t see me trying to glue myself to the next rocket that SpaceX launches.
After having gone through the process of trying to help an Indian trans person find a job in my country in order to allow them to get here legally and having found the requirements being draconic, I don’t care about anyone illegally moving to a country as long as they behave respectfully, which they most usually do because conflicts where the police gets involved are more likely to get them deported. Do I want them to pay taxes? Sure, but the extent to which they’re able to pay taxes depends on the country deciding to regularize their status.
Rules are rules and if you don’t follow them, the country doesn’t want you.
It’s a different conversation when you talk about the consequences of such policies, but that’s what the country decided and those are the rules.
A bit tangential, but there are a lot of cases when the country doesn’t want you, especially if you listen to the opinion of the officials. They are quick to judge one to be too poor, too old, too stupid, too smart, too demanding, too questioning their decisions, etc.
The hilarity of half this list being things natives within a country often don’t do themselves, and the other half only because they literally can’t.
The US for example has Christian nationalists trying to impose their own values on everyone else, there is an entire branch of government which exists because people don’t like to pay taxes, everyone I know has done under the table work at one point or another, and I know plenty of native born shoplifters.
But somehow those idiots are more deserving to be here than an immigrant who would be denied entry, but snuck across the border 15 years ago and has been contributing more to society than many Americans?
Get the fuck outta here with that BS.
Uh, yeah, the “native” population of a country is more deserving to be in their country regardless of circumstance than an illegal immigrant, that’s how countries work. Legal immigrants are also deserving. The citizenry of a country get to have those discussions about how they want their country to run, not other countries. The citizens not paying taxes, shoplifting, and breaking the law should be prosecuted for those crimes, the same as someone breaking immigration laws. It’s not a good thing when any government picks and chooses which laws don’t apply to which people, because it’s not usually the poor and the immigrant that benefits. Based on your apparent support for unlimited and unregulated immigration, I will assume you also claim to be anti-colonial and I’ll assume you disagree with countries meddling with or toppling other governments.
The US illegally flooded Texas with both legal and illegal immigrants, who didn’t integrate into the Mexican culture, kept isolated, and tried to impose their values on Mexico (hint: slavery was a “value”). They eventually caused a rebellion, and flipped the territory to join the US in the end. Europe sent a lot of illegal immigrants all over the world to impose their values on the countries they pulled into their empires. China flooded Tibet with immigrants to the same effect as Texas. The western world had a habit for not liking when a part of a countries citizens would try to impose socialist or communist values on everyone else in that country; I’ll assume you wouldn’t support the foreign intervention that happened to stop those movements, believing that those countries should get to make they determination themselves. I’ll even go out on a limb and assume you condem Israeli settlers illegally immigrating into the West Bank and Gaza.
All severe examples of worst case scenarios and weaponized immigration, but why does territorial sovereignty apply in these cases while not applying to the current mass immigration happening worldwide right now. The intent may be different, 99.99% of illegal immigration across the Southern US border and across the Mediterranean is more “benign” economic migration, but laws should still apply. It is hypocritical to condem border and immigration enforcement in the US and EU, while then condemning border and immigration violation by Russia, China, and Israel. Countries can’t exist without enforceable borders, and enforcement should be consistently and fairly applied based on rule of law.
As such lovers of free market capitalism, shouldn’t Republicans want immigrants to come here and compete for work so that corporations can get employees for the lowest wages possible?
Which is ironically the classic leftist argument against free migration until the one world economy is realized. Constant immigration of low skilled labor serves the capitalist class by suppressing wages and stirring up resentment amongst the rabble so they turn on each other instead of their oppressor.
shouldn’t Republicans want immigrants to come here and compete for work
Yes, they do - which is why they do everything in their power to keep that disempowered labor disempowered by hysterically painting them as an “other” that must be repressed through every means available.
It’s just how right-wing ideology has always worked.
They do, immigration is a often a talking point for manipulating the hateful.
Terking all er jerbs!*
FTFY
Derk a derrr!!!
This kind of reasoning is consistent across all forms of bigotry. Having self contradictory believes about a demographic just so nothing they can do will be the right thing for them to do.
They move so slowly and lazily that they are invisible to the average human.
Loads of xenophobic idiots laugh at me for this, but I’m noticing a lot of migrations due to climate change. Honestly IMO it will only get worse as time goes on.
I’ve been thinking we should play on xenophobe’s fears to get them to support actions to curb climate change.
At least their bigotry will have some positive result then.
Of course, ideally, they could be convinced that not “all brown people are bad” (sic) and also support climate change action, but we all now how likely that is.
This is absolutely possible when people receive welfare and simultaneously work without paying tax. I live in a neighborhood where people are doing this and they are quite open about it, too.
The trouble is that people either do A) deny their existence and everyone who claims differently is a Nazi. Or B) become a right winger or demand there shall be no welfare efforts.
There’s an estimation done in Germany every year. And the result is always that only around 4% of the the people on welfare abuse it. Compared to the damage that is done to the state by clever tax evasion of super rich people, these are peanuts. But going after these 4% of welfare abusers is of course easier so that’s why they put a lot effort into it.
It is kind of strange how much more of a visceral reaction people have to the idea of poor people cheating the system, compared to rich people cheating the system. Logically, it seems like the latter should get people a lot more riled up, which I guess speaks to the power of their propaganda.
Oh but you see, the rich guys are resourceful and clever while the poor are lazy criminals.
See there’s this idea that when rich people cheat the system, they are being intelligent and finding proper loopholes, and by showcasing enough diligence and intellect to find these loopholes they are proving why they deserve to be rich in the first place.
Poor people who cheat the system, often so that they can stay alive. They are seen as inhuman and the idea is that if they weren’t cretins they wouldn’t be so poor as to need to cheat to begin with.
Admittedly, this seems to be changing as the gap between the rich and the poor grows wider and wider and wider, with the temporarily embarrassed millionaires now becoming Furious and hungry.
I think you’re very right. But there’s also something that makes one change how they see rich doing “tax optimisation”, that I know because I now see it as something amoral, which I didn’t before.
But also, the difference between poor and middle was bigger thatln middle and rich at some point in time. Now that is the opposite, any one from the middle class is closer to being poor than to being rich, that also may affect opinion shift
I think your 100% right, and it’s a cognitive bias referred to as the Halo Effect.
It’s because people have strange hang ups about how “a victim” is supposed to be, I think. That is why many people who start helping drug addicts and the homeless are often disillusioned at first, when they find out that many of these people can be quite the assholes.
The same goes for those who are rather at the short end of the stick themselves and actually have to live in poor neighborhoods. It’s easier to be virtue signalling about how you supposedly care for poor people than actually living with them.
People need to separate “being good” from deserving help. That would make a lot of problems much easier to work on.
A couple year ago I volunteered to a community school kitchen, funded by taxes, a lot kids didn’t need the food, some leaved things they didn’t like, one or two straight up throwed food in the trashcan, but for those 5-10 little shits there was always one kid who would eat all his food, and he did because he didn’t have food at home, and I know what is to be hungry as a child. That program is worth every fuckin cent just for that child, and many more like him.
And how are they supposed to get these statistics?
As far as I know, they make these estimates on the basis of how many sanctions and repayments the Job Center imposes. But since it’s not easy at all to get by these people and the effort isn’t worth it, there is no way to say how many people are doing it.
But if you try to convince people to think smart(er) about the problem, it doesn’t help to deny the reality they are actually living in. It would make more sense to show how it’s the employer who makes profit from tax evasion.
