bigpeeler: "Decency".

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So there's this big argument going on about how:

A) We're about how to have a couple of bad decades and inviting in the world will make them way worse as we place lots of extra stress on the welfare state.
A2) It's a democracy, damnit.  Stop electing a new people because you don't want to compete for actual votes with the people you have.

vs.

B) Going with A means we just ignore a hell of a lot of human suffering that we could be resolving by pulling a Merkel.

Germany's got 80 million people, they just invited in 1.5 Million this year alone, and the best guess is that each one of those will chain-migrate in another 4 to 8 people.

So that's ~10 Million people we saved from third world poverty.  Never mind that only 40% of them will ever have a job.  Better to be starving on German welfare (Read: 75th global percentile) than in Syria.

InfrasonicTom: Has anyone done the math on the sustainability of perpetual immigration to one country? Not hating on anyone but isn't there some sort of limit before things actually start turning bad?

http://web.archive.org/web/20150915183602/https://econstudentlog.wordpress.com/2015/09/12/a-data-post-on-recent-immigration-developments-where-im-coming-from/

Short version: It depends on WHO you're taking in.

A welfare state depends upon a balance of takers and givers (And if you want to use different wording, I'm quite happy to.  If nothing else, you take for the first 20 years of your life, give for the next 40, and take for the next ).  The richer, more productive, and just MORE givers, and fewer and lower-demand takers you have, the more you can give to each taker and the less you have to take from each giver.

If there's 1.4 Million givers, and 1 taker, and the 1 taker wants $25 Million, the givers pay less than a penny an hour and go on with their lives.  PS: This is called Walmart, and the taker is the CEO, and this is pretty horrific, but there's no way those 1.4 Million employees could pay for 500 CEO's.  Or 500,000.

And if say, each taxpayer pays $500K in taxes over their lifetime and each autistic person costs $1.5 Million, this isn't a problem when autistic people are .001% of the population and is when they are 25%.  Or is a problem if that $500K number drops to $20K.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150915183602/https://econstudentlog.wordpress.com/2015/09/12/a-data-post-on-recent-immigration-developments-where-im-coming-from/

The Danish welfare state is predicated on 75% labor force participation rates at relatively high incomes.  Then they import a bunch of Muslims, of whom 13% find jobs in 3 years, and ~40% find jobs EVER unto further generations.

Which gets you this:

*The direct government costs associated with the refugees who'll arrive in Denmark this year has been estimated at 9.2 billion Danish kroners (~$1,4 billion). Last year's costs were 4,7 billion kroners, and in 2011 the number was below 3 billion kroners. As a comparison, last year the government spent 23,2 billion kroners on defence and 18,6 billion kroners on 'public order and safety' (Statistics Denmark,Statistikbanken - OFF24: Offentligt forbrug fordelt på hovedfunktioner og individuel og kollektiv andel) (presumably most of the latter was spent on the police force).

Except the subtle issue here is:

1) That we're not importing Muslims, we're importing Mexicans.  Who don't fark their cousins (literally.  The Middle East has a problem), don't launch terrorist attacks, and generally work their asses off.  In 0-income, low-skill jobs costing us lots more to school their kids and pay for the highways they use than they pay in taxes, but.

300 Chechens in the USA did a lot more damage than 40 Million Mexicans.

In fact, once you age/poverty-norm, they're less likely to be in prison than white people.

2) If the Mexicans might cost us money in the long-term, and can pay in more than they cost in schooling, infrastructure, and welfare over the next 20 years, that's a good thing even if they cost us money in the long run.  Because the Baby Boomers are about to get old, and then die, and cost a shiatton of money in the meantime.  So as long as the equation eventually converges and you aren't counting on an immigration Ponzi Scheme, we're good.

Mind you, the average Hispanic makes $20K and has 3.5 kids who cost $12,750 on average for every year they're in school, so I don't think that's the case, but.

Or possibly more relevant:

A few years ago I took a course on the economics of the welfare state, and in his lecture notes about 'Challenges to the Scandinavian welfare model' (Challenges to the Scandinavian welfare model - part B, May 2011′), Torben M. Andersen included some data on immigration and how this variable affects fiscal sustainability; I don't have a direct link, unfortunately, as I'm quoting from printed slides, but I thought the numbers would be interesting. At the time those slides were made (the slides are from 2011), the employment frequency of Danish males was 79%, and the female employment frequency was 74%. High employment rates like these is why the Danish welfare state hasn't collapsed yet despite the high taxes. The employment frequency of immigrants and descendants from low income countries were 52% for males and 40% for females. In terms of a hypothetical increased migration by 5000 immigrants, an estimate presented indicated that "perfect immigration" would lead to a positive effect on the sustainability indicator of 1.26, whereas "super" migrants would lead to a positive effect of 0.35 (both are highly unlikely, and imply what is in some sense counterfactual assumptions about e.g. labour market participation rates of immigrants). Increased immigration from more developed countries would have a net effect of approximately zero (-0.03), increased immigration of people made up of the kind of immigrants that we were taking in at that moment ('the current composition') would have a negative effect (-0.18), and increased immigration from less developed countries would imply a substantial negative effect, which would be significantly larger (-0.54) than the positive effect associated with 'super immigrants'. Again, keep in mind that the less developed countries we talk about here include some countries which do reasonably well, none of which are muslim countries. The estimates above are not one of a kind, thus the Danish Welfare Commission's report for example concluded that the net lifetime contribution rates of non-Western male and female immigrants as well as the net lifetime contribution rates of both male and female descendants from non-Western countries were all negative; I briefly covered these results on my blog some time ago.

BigBurrito: meyerkev: Mind you, the average Hispanic makes $20K and has 3.5 kids who cost $12,750 on average for every year they're in school, so I don't think that's the case, but.

So not much different than a majority of the counties is the south?

1) To a point yes.  But it's a couple orders of magnitude.
2) So why do you want to import more Southerners?  The average Hispanic household ends up in about the same spot as the average Mississippian, and I doubt that adding 100 Million Mississippians will end up with a positive income for Social Security and Medicare either.

BigBurrito: meyerkev: So why do you want to import more Southerners?  The average Hispanic household ends up in about the same spot as the average Mississippian, and I doubt that adding 100 Million Mississippians will end up with a positive income for Social Security and Medicare either.

My point was to de-focus your concentration on race, as you really hurt your argument.

Why do you doubt a hundred million Mississippians would be able to generate economic activity, start with that.

Because they haven't.

I don't think they could generate enough economic activity to pay their pensions, their infrastructure, and their schooling at present levels on present tax rates.

US GDP/capita is $53K.  Mississippi is $29K/capita.  Adding 100 Million Mississippians would be a bad thing for the continuing sustainability of the welfare state.