Carly(Poohbear) wrote:
So lets say Mexico and Argentina join the United States and a lot of them want to come over and live in Texas, you think that is perfectly OK but more to the point will Texas will be able to take a mass influx?
Well, if Mexico and Argentina did join the US, unlikely as that would be, then yes.
That's part of the whole USA deal. Not only would that be okay, but have you
seen Texas? Lotta open ground there. Now if they all wanted to cram into Rhode Island that would be another story.
The southern US already gets a pretty heavy stream of immigrants, and there's always someone griping about "those" people taking jobs and/or resources away from US citizens. But most of those claims are on shaky ground. A lot of the jobs they "take" are unskilled, low-paying labor that most actual citizens turn up their noses at. They don't actually want to
do those jobs, they just resent the idea that someone from outside might
get the jobs. Or that somehow they'll get welfare, or in some way a citizen might have to pay for an immigrant - somehow - with tax dollars. If you actually crunch real numbers, the impact isn't nearly as great as, say, inefficiencies in our defense budget, but there's a nativist irritation driving those feelings, and it's an easy target.
However, if Mexico - which is several of its own states - joined, they would no longer be "them", but be part of "us", subject to all our laws, not an independent country anymore. They wouldn't need to come to Texas or anywhere else, to get US wages and protections. Not that there wouldn't be growing pains, but if we're going to hypothesize a scenario where they wanted to join and we wanted to let them, we could assume that we saw through our differences enough to sort some of that out. (What's more, historically it wouldn't be the first time the US took over an area that had previously belonged to Mexico.)
And that's what I think is some of the problem with the UK
vis a vis the EU: I'm getting the sense that (parts of) the UK didn't want to be part of the United States of Europe, it wanted to be UK Kind of Affiliated with Europe but Not Seriously Part of it For Real.
Carly(Poohbear) wrote:Hmmm... You have Independence day... Think about it...
Yeah, we broke away from the UK because we were being taxed without representation. Now we're taxed with representation. Then a bunch of our states tried to have Independence Day II, Except for Our Slaves. That worked well.