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This will be my last response, as I believe I have explained my positions sufficiently. I don’t believe in debate for the sake of debate, even if it can be fun. This is not to accuse you of causing undue debate – I don’t believe you did. I can only dedicate so much time and energy to responding to people.

I think the distinction of legal and illegal immigrants serves as a foot in the door for culture war distraction[…]

Ok, assuming you are right, what would be a solution to try to solve the problem with illegal immigration and all its consequences ?

I don’t believe undocumented immigration to be a problem. If anything immigration as a problem is a construction to conveniently justify not changing the present state of things on a fundamental level, which would require rethinking and undoing the domestic/foreign dichotomy and with that also many aspects of (private) property, since private ownership is based on exclusion on multiple levels: Personal, stockholder-wide, national, etc…

Aside from that I don’t believe that a critique becomes valid when an alternative is offered. Also, critique can often mean a behaviour or line of argument should be avoided full stop, for example when I have the option of threatening someone to get money back. A. A person might return money out of a more intrinsic motivation B. I might not get much from demanding my money back as that entails expending valuable time. I can go around justifying all kinds of facts of life, but that wouldn’t get me any closer to answering questions beyond the level of phenomena. So I better not focus on creating justifications of present phenomena at all.

Lastly, in order to advance I need to diagnose what is going wrong. I can not provide solutions to nothingness. Solutions by definition have causes and reasons. Critique is a necessary first step and can stand exist as is without going beyond scope.

The step after that is introducing legislation to make working visas less of a certainty, usually that’s coupled to worse working conditions[…]

I think that here you are wrong. If you make working visas less viable the local worker gain something in my opinion. Companies still need workers and now they have a smaller pool to choose from.

The super low paying jobs where immigrant employment is high now have to be done by local workers. That is not a gain. Industries that rely on highly specialised and educated workers from abroad like healthcare are less able to address demand, that in turn drives up prices, which hits workers (and the unemployed) the hardest.

What make working condition worse for everyone (local population, legal and illegal immigrants) is that when you have a lot of illegal immigrants an unscrupulous employer can simply hire one of them at a fraction of what he should pay a legal worker.

Yes of course, that is why it makes a lot of sense to give undocumented immigrants the chance to become documented immigrants. A “legal” immigrant can demand more pay without fear and thereby raise wages for the vast majority of people by a little. I’m not talking about creating massive social programs and giving away citizenship, just a little tweak that could go a long way. Unfortunately politics as of late makes decisions that favour the market.

Many voters of right wing parties don’t have a problem with immigrants as long as they’re the right immigrants in their view.

Which basically means that people has no problems with people who work honestly and contribute to the society.

I think I have shown it’s difficult to even determine what a “right” immigrant is. I think this view of there being right and wrong immigrants is on a basic level a false dichotomy.

The question is: since a country can absorb a certain number of new immigrant every year, why we should allow in people we know we cannot handle in a decent way ?

I doubt that “we” can know these things and supposing “we” did, what is then stopping “us” from applying this logic to citizens who are not on their best behaviour? If your answer to this is “No, we can’t. We a have responsibility to other countries to not sully them with the worst of our own”, then what is keeping this exclusionary logic from putting citizens into forced labour camps or killing them?

This way you are simply ruining the society (where people will start to look at extremist like a solution, think AfD) and the immigrant, both the already legal ones and the new legal ones, to not talk about the illegal ones.

I firmly reject this notion.

Criminals doing petty crime are not able to find regular employment when the state cracks down on them. They walk into the arms of human traffickers, which does not decrease the crime rate in any way. At best, crimes are made hidden or moved geographically.

The point is to have less crime avoiding to have people on the country that need to live by petty crimes. And to do this you need to keep immigration in check.

Crime is decreasing in spite of immigration. Immigration is not well correlated with crime and better understood through economics like the ghetto tax and so on. You are imagining a problem.

The important distinction here is trying and being. As someone who works, you likely have rather few resources to fund a business.

I don’t need too much. The fund you need depends heavily on what you want to do. Currently I could easily open a consulting business that can sustain my family in the end, and I don’t need too much resources. I simply choose not because I like better to work 9-18 and then be free.

I don’t place much emphasis on anecdotes. I mean good for you, but the statistics look different.

You won’t be able to provide as much collateral on loans as people with capital, i.e. people whose property works for them. You are significantly disadvantaged.

No, I am not significantly disadvantaged. Or better, it depends on what business you are thinking about. In certain cases you are right, in other you are wrong.

You are significantly disadvantaged. A big consulting firm will outspend you, will already have a name for itself, and potentially swallow you if you become too big. I am 100% right here with the exception of the few startups that win the business lottery at best, and even that case I am not really incorrect since I take stochastic effects in that vein into account.

Certainly. But you have duties and in the army example those duties entail grave acts such as taking another’s life and giving one’s own.

I would have not a problem to kill an enemy soldier who has as target to kill me and my family.

You have more in common with the “enemy” soldier than with the people that put you both into war. You don’t get to see the president in person just like that, the enemy soldier you do see.

Also it is your job to kill the enemy soldier along with their family potentially. Everyone says they’re defending themselves.

Then again the army is a low hanging fruit since they’ll take all kinds of people.

No, they will not take all kinds of people. To enter the army you need to meet a minimum level. In may case the problem is that I am too old now, but when I enlisted people were excluded because they were deemed unsuitable, for physical or psychological reasons.

They won’t take all kinds of people outside of war or tensions. The situation changes when an army is involved in a war. Project 100,000

Throughout history armies have been famous for using, as it were, less capable troops as cannon fodder. War, war never changes.

I don’t think so. The state, police and monopolies on violence are a recent phenomenon.

If you define “recent” as the last three thousand years, then I agree.

Police forces have only existed for only four-hundred years, and that is a charitable estimate. Modern humans have existed for more than 100,000 years as hunter-gatherers that were internally relatively peaceful.

In every society starting with the ancient Egypt there were some sort of justice system that was handled by the state

Ancient Greek and Roman societies are the first to have justice systems with legal professionals. Before that you had religious courts. Those had more in common with divine rituals than the careful application of law. Contradictory as it may sound to modern ears, laws did not start out as legalistic code.

Previous societies, that weren’t states as you know them, were structured quite differently. Feudalism required peasants to give a share of their crops to their lords. There were no banking systems, which only begin to start popping up in Italy by the 14th century and it took banks three centuries to become widespread in Europe.

States as centralised holders of capital have only been a thing since banking, taxation, free trade, and employment became central. The removal of barriers to finance is signalled by Cromwell and the French Revolution, among other things. See the development of economic freedom.

There are arguments to be made about cities being precocious, but my point about the state being recent still stands. At best states are 5,500 years old, the fully developed nation-state is maybe only 350 (probably closer to 250) years old.

and sometime with way more violence than today

That is highly subjective. In terms of destructive power I think modern weaponry is the most violent by a long shot.

History is littered with systems where social conduct was shaped without purely punitive or violent measures. Who is to say that the nation state is the end-all-be-all?

For example ?

Some Native American societies, aspects of Maori society and a few other Polynesian societies.

This does not really engage with the argument. States don’t have responsibilities like people.

But States are made of people.

Yes, but group behaviour is different from individual behaviour.