Did the USA benefit, or did it suffer, when all those german and jewish rocket scientists came in the late 40s and early 50s?
Even if they dont get jobs, they still bring useful insights from their different experience base to the country. Kind of high-thinking, but still true.
For a real, and present example: Jack o lanterns.
We did not do this custom until AFTER the irish potato famine, that brought literal boatloads of refugees here. Originally, it was a carved turnip. It mutated on exposure to pumpkins. Now we have a new cultural fixture. Would not have happened if millions of poor irish people had not literally sold themselves to get here, even though they could not find work.
This day and age we don't necessarily need immigration to exchange cultures. there are gazzilion Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai restaurants in Israel and no major immigration from those countries. There are all sort of international events that got spread through facebook and twitter and there are all sorts of cultural quirks that got transferred without immigrants transferring them.
I find it hard to understand the argument for immigration to developed countries in the face of the automation revolution. why would a country want more people if they can only provide less and less jobs.
Because it's cheaper to import skilled people than to train locals to have those skills. Building high-tech schools is a long-term prospect. If those skills are going to be automated soon, then it makes sense to poach skilled people from other countries rather than to invest in training infrastructure. So ... a skill that's on the verge of being automated, but not quite yet is actually the #1 thing you'd want to use immigrants to fill the gap, while you close down existing training of locals.
But that's not a mass scale immigration that will demographically make a difference, not when speaking about the amount of workers needed to run an automated country.
Also, immigrants are consumers. Without immigrants you would see price deflation and therefore no investment.
I am not an economist, but i think the costs of having more unemployed people in your country is also a factor that needs considering when debating immigration. again, remind you, we are talking about a near future where millions in the U.S gonna find themselves out of work so a sort of universal basic income is inevitable, but its rate will depend on the number of recipients, the less recipients, the higher that basic income. if that basic income will be low, there will also be little investment. this is all need to be in proportion to the country's economy obviously, but i just wonder whether we in the developed world are already beginning to stretch those boundaries.
Statistically, Japan is in "Oh shit, sweet mother of god, we are in serious SHIT!!" territory there. Historical numbers indicate imminent cultural collapse, but then again, old data is for a world with much higher mortality rates.
Cultural collapse? how so? Japan is a good example of how a country makes itself more suitable to that technological change. high "machine trusting" culture and rich consumption culture. the Japanese problem is that they maybe culturally outpaced technology by a decade or two.
the farmers wont hire them, because then they have to pay social security, and min wage. Not enough profit margin.
In healthcare, it is expensive. People expect to pay a lot for that care. People dont expect to pay a lot for a 1lb clamshell of strawberries.
Why don't they pay social security and min wage to the mexicans? what's the difference between them and americans? or are we speaking about mexicans pickers in mexico?