10% of Cubans left Cuba between 2022 and 2023

I am a British immigrant in Germany and I can vouch for how impossible it is to integrate into these northern European societies, if the rest are anything like Germany. I tick all the boxes of what German boomers would want in a "Good Immigrant" (white, educated, from western Europe, speaks German, good job), but it doesn't help.

I think overall Germans, deep down, don't really want us here. We are here to pay for the pension bill—that's literally it. But since we are here, they want us to completely assimilate and give up everything about yourself that came from our homelands. There is no respect nor appreciation for any external culture, so your "differences" have negative value, because you have to Be German.

I dated a third generation Turkish German for 2 years whilst I lived here and she faced fairly casual racism from white Germans with a regularity that would be unthinkable in the UK. She was often getting complimented on how good her German (it's her mother tongue) was or asked about what country she came from (she was born and raised in Germany). It's a racist country. Don't believe the PR about how liberal Germany is—it's liberal if you're white and German.

And I say all this as a white Western European. It's going to be so much harder for the average Syrian or Afghan.

Can you explain in what way did this manifest in Sweden for instance? Or have any data/evidence besides some semi-vague claims about antisemitism and some immutable characteristics of European societies (which are hardly monolithic to begin with).

If you live in Sweden then you will also know that the state puts refugees in the same areas (Rinkeby, Vivalla, Tensta, etc ...). These areas are then labeled as unsafe because of a slightly elevated crime rate and because they're labeled unsafe, swedes start moving out and quality of services and house prices drop and the downward spiral continues until the area becomes a ghetto even though they're usually not that bad.

Although SFI exists to teach Swedish to immigrants, the quality of the teaching is not great in most schools.

That's where the integration effort stops.

Even professionals who move to Sweden for work have a hard time integrating in Swedish society. That's how you end up with people living in upscale parts of Stockholm for 10+ years and can barely form a sentence in Sweden.

I should be clear... I'm not talking about Nordic countries regarding Jews. Swedes, Norwegians and Danes are considered heroes in this regard, and the historical analogies to the rest of Western Europe don't hold. There was no history of ghettoization or discrimination there. I am not applying my criticism there.

It should be said that the pre-WW2 Jewish population of Sweden was miniscule, but that Swedes took great personal risks to save these refugees from a culture they did not know.

The rise in antisemitic attacks in France, conducted entirely by Muslim immigrants, is a feature of the weakness of the French pluralist/secularist and legal state which again appears to be failing to integrate new arrivals into its Enlightenment ideals. One hopes Sweden doesn't fall into the same trap. But my gripe is about integration, and historically Sweden has not had to deal with anything on the scale of what is happening now.

When looking at how wealthy democracies integrate immigrants the English speaking countries are dramatically more successful across all the standard objective metrics like crime rates or income compared to the native population. So Sweden isn't relevant.

As a Swede, we have always been very bad letting foreigners in. Most, even otherwise liberal and well educated, have been low key racist. One part has been that anyone not speaking perfect Swedish has been seen as bit stupid. Having a foreign sounding name has made it much harder to get to an interview. Imagine growing up with hard working parents with engineering or medical degrees working as cleaners because no one wants to employ them because of their names or the way they speak. Would you be motivated to study or work hard? The only places where you feel welcome are in the mosques or in a gang.

What gives me a bit of hope is that this seem to be quite rapidly changing, at least in part of society. I have been working at a company in central Stockholm where none! of about 100 employees had even immigrated parents. I’m working in a large company right now where some departments still are 100% native Swedes, but other, that see what a waste it is to not use all this talent, employ 50% or more first or second generation of immigrants.

Everywhere in Europe that welcomed Jews, their neighbors attacked them whenever the Plague came around, blaming them for poisoning wells. To be blunt, if that hadn't happened, the Jews would have probably disappeared into the general European population by the 15th Century. So you are supporting the point that village rumors led to a situation of permanent exclusion for Gypsies.

And this is despite billions of welfare money given for housing, free education, free access to health, etc.

This assumes those things help one integrate. The Unites States notably doesn't have these things to the same degree that countries in Europe do. This means immigrants in America need to work. And work is a strong forcing function for socialization and integration.

You mentioned Gypsies, well I read scholarly work stating that they were warmly welcomed 4 centuries ago in the towns of my region, until people discovered a tendency of their purses to disappear.

Do you have a citation for that?

It sounds from your comment that you are from Europe, but if you visit the US, you should travel to the south, find some white conservatives, and discuss black people. They will make astonishingly similar points to the ones you brought up, you'll find you and they have a lot in common.

And that's what we call racism.

scholarly work stating that they were warmly welcomed 4 centuries ago

Yeah, that doesn't sound legit. Any general sentiment from that time period is lost, and the best your scholar can do is project the lens of the present onto sources from the past. To be fair, all histories are done that way.

I agree with your negative version of the point:

> if you don't accept a countries values, you should not be allowed to move there

But in the positive version, I think in America it is much easier to integrate if you do accept American values than it is in some European countries. And this is because, as you alluded, the only thing that makes America a unified country is a social agreement to certain shared values like rule of law, property rights, freedom to conduct business, freedom of religion, and more recently civil rights. Whereas those ideals are only recently tacked on to (most) European nations, and are not core to their identity; one can accept all those values and still never become German, for instance. Even France where many of those values originated has an ethnic nationalist core which denies integration to those who are not ethnically French. So what I mean is, accepting values in Europe is a start, but it is not enough.

And what we see in ghettoized cultures around the world, from African Americans to Algerians in France, is that the ghetto creates its own logic of rejecting the norms of the society which has rejected it. Welfare is not a substitute for a path toward individual success and acceptance in society; this is perhaps Europe's greatest mistake. On welfare, in the suburbs, who will believe and not mock the supposed values of equality and fraternity? It becomes a generational problem.

I think its perfectly reasonable to say that if you don't accept a countries values, you should not be allowed to move there.

If we are still talking about France, then this is a country that 10 years ago saw big groups loudly oppose same-sex marriage, and who now oppose assisted reproduction. The (black female) minister carrying the law was subject to vile racist and sexist caricatures and mockery. France is a country whose president characterised the denunciations of sexual abuse by a famous actor as a man hunt. More recently still, an "expert" was heard on a widely watched TV network blaming the victims of rape for the reduction of births in the west. The same TV network that had to apologise a few months ago for claiming that abortion is the leading cause of deaths in the world.

The common point between all of these? They were all people of long term French descent. Not recent immigrants. There is no accepted "country's values" to begin with. There are laws, which are enforced and which immigrants and natives alike are expected to obey.

Now since you are talking about America, there are plenty of Americans, descendants of Americans for generations, who oppose abortion, to the point where it's all but illegal in several states. The past and likely future president is a rapist who bragged about it. There are no universally shared values among the American people around the rights of women either, and that's true even if we don't count immigrants as "true" Americans, whatever that may mean. America is a country which until very recently had segregation laws, and the "values" these laws represented didn't suddenly disappear when these laws were repelled.

Before claiming that immigrants should be accepting a country's values there should be some clarity around what those values are. Then someone should decide what to do with the people in the country who don't share those values. Political regimes that implement such "values"-based systems have a name: fascism.

It is ironic that you would speak of a country's values, especially in the context of the USA, where many people that consider each other Americans don't even accept each other's values

Just worth pointing out, exactly 100 years ago, they didn't think Jews could integrate into the America - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924

I'm not unsympathetic to the idea that mainstream Islam, since then 1970s, has morphed into something closer to extreme ultraorthodox Judaism or an extreme branch of Christianity. And this is certainly an obstacle to integration. But it is not irreversible, and I think in particular rejection by a foreign host culture serves to reinforce that extremism. North Korean defectors have a lot of trouble assimilating in South Korea, despite speaking the same language. Their hard drives are formatted differently, their software is different. The goal of a host society should be to study where the differences present themselves acutely and how to alleviate the pain and rejection of individual emigrants without accepting extremism or compromising the values of the culture into which they have immigrated. This means teaching individualism and the importance of education and self sufficiency rather than doling out welfare subsistence, but it also means the mainstream culture must actively try to embrace the individuals who wish to become part of mainstream society. Europe fails in both.

W/r/t the failure of the US toward Black people, I completely agree with the sibling comment by user:avz and would have nothing more to add.

The US has extended the protection of the law to the law-abiding Irish, Italians, Germans, Russians, Jews, East Asians, Indians, and Latinos freeing them up to flourish and build human capital. By contrast, the same state has not only failed to do so for the Black community, but its agents have engaged in extrajudicial killings of the community's members with impunity since they lost their legal "protection" as someone else's private property.

Community under assault will redirect its private efforts to security which then undermines cultural and economic development and slows down formation of human capital. That's because security needs are fundamental and trump cultural and economic development [1].

Regarding Indian Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, I disagree they are indistinguishable for outsiders. Typically, anybody who cares can tell by the name, place where they live, or even just the job they do.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre

Are we really grouping all black people in one group here? The only thing that matters is income in the US. A poor white and a poor black have a lot in common, and the reason why we tend to have poorer black vs whites is because of lasting damage from institutional racism over the last century that precluded many opportunities contemporary whites had to begin building generational wealth. It’s that simple. That being said, generational wealth among the black population has been building all this time. There are black communities today that have very high income levels and rates of homeownership.

"Indian" is not a monolith.

Neither is "Punjabi", "Gujarati", or "Pahari" which are most South Asians in the UK.

I'm South Asian American with family in Europe, and in all honestly Asians in Europe aren't as well integrated because of Europeans.

The US and Canada is nowhere as passive aggressively racist as Europe is (well, Massachusetts is very similar in it's attitude).

In much of North America, there is still buy-in for the "Horatio Alger" story and communities are fairly used to immigrants.

The path from Jewish emancipation in law to Jewish integration in practice was slowed and stymied by antisemitism at every turn, to greater and lesser degrees in different countries. It is hard to believe that Jews were ever regarded as true equals, broadly, in a country which willingly handed over so many to the Nazis. And of course in Spain, Jews were not full citizens and the practice of Judaism was simply forbidden entirely until 1978.

The only reason you're thinking this way it's because you're thinking about problematic migrants, but there are many others you don't see. They don't need to become French, Spanish, Dutch, etc. They're perfectly fine feeling from $country in $eurocountry, going on with their lifes.

Europe is not the US, it can't be, and that doesn't mean we're at fault of everything. Many poor migrants come and do ok and have the same opportunities and challenges that others who fail.

But somehow is always the same subset we think about.

One thing nearly every American agrees on is if you’re a citizen, you’re American. It’s actually an extremely welcoming and beautiful thing about this country.

The Pakistani (most Pahari/Mirpuri) community was segregated in de facto ghettos and were brought to work unskilled manual labor jobs in a couple industrial estates in the 50s-70s.

When the UK began deindustrializing, they were extremely hard hit because the factories shut down.

Poverty and Northern England racism (BNP was normalized and doing hate crimes well into the early 2000s, schools were shite with grammar schools closing, etc) kept Mirpuris stuck in the ghetto.

And trust me - a Brown guy - when I say that tbe UK is miles more racist and passive aggressive to Desis compared to the US or Canada.

Why integrate in a country that keeps being passive aggressive and using your community as a scapegoat.

This is why my parents moved to North America instead of Europe in the 1990s - heck my dad had an offer to work for ARM plc in Cambridge back then around the initial IPO.

None of the doors I was able to open here in the US would have been opened if I were in the UK or Germany.

I'll get amazing schacenfreude when Labour finishes signing the FTA with India in a couple months and Rolls Royce and Dyson begin slowly moving operations.

Some have a culture that indoctrinated them to exploit and explicitly not integrate with the general population.

Can we be more specific please?

I live in an European country and have not observed what you're describing here.

There are individuals and groups that have tendencies like you describe, but the generalization doesn't hold in my eyes.

I've had refugees in my family, inner circle, at workplaces and so on. The most general observation I can make is that people who tend to flee or migrate from authoritarian, politically oppressive places tend to be very appreciative of social democratic systems.

The tendency of a subsection of orthodox Jews from one area of Eastern Europe to self-ghettoize is something of a red herring. In Western Europe, Jews were never truly integrated unless they converted. And even those who converted and their mixed race children were ultimately slaughtered for their ethnic background, giving lie to the notion that even a WWI veteran ex-Jew could become German.

The Haredi (ultraorthodox) movement itself is a reaction to urban Jews who wished to assimilate when such a thing became conceivable in the 19th C. And this is a ghetto mentality. In American terms, your question would be equivalent to "which Black people?" Implying that people who claim and cling to ghetto culture have a hard time integrating. But that 1. dismisses the role that ghettoization had on creating a subculture in the first place, and then 2. pretends the subculture itself is the reason for failure to integrate, i.e. that it's the cause rather than the effect, and 3. serves to allow and excuse and justify the mainstream of society projecting their negative perceptions of that subculture onto individual members of the same ethnic group who would like to integrate without completely renouncing their unique heritage. And in the Jewish case, even complete renunciation wasn't enough, so perhaps the ghetto culture had a point.

To antisemites, the type of Jew is not relevant.

I take your point though. Even nominally homgenous societies will stratify and have out-groups.

The economy sucks for everyone, not only a subset of poor migrants. A subset of african migrants show up in crime stats way more than plenty of other poor migrants coming from pretty much everywhere, be it asia, africa or latam.

Some poor indian has no advantage coming to Spain compared to someone from the Magreb, in fact we could argue quite the opposite as their support networks/country of origin are pretty far away.

I don’t know man. This idea of certain cultures being so distant that they cannot be integrated with others sounds a bit alien to me. If anything, we (all the different cultures in this planet) are the result of a vast amount of mixing over the centuries. We probably don’t notice it anymore (proof that the mix has worked wonders) and we think we all are so good because “our” culture, “our” values. I mean, if something so profound such as religion was literally imported to America, anything is possible. Sometimes I wish we were invaded by aliens 100% different from us in every aspect, so that we realised once and for all that we all humans just are and feel the same.

There was as much (more, even) pressure on the Italians and Irish to do the same.

But, to add to and enforce OP's point, their cultures were a larger schism away and they instead held on and entrenched their identities (to their objective detriment, no matter your moral stance). Meanwhile, Anglo, Franco, German, Dutch, etc cultures all kind of melded into the early "White American" identity; due to the general ease of assimilation.

German-Americans left a high-social-trust, low-crime culture

Did they? I can't speak to the crime rate of the German empire, but a very common reason to immigrate, in addition to availability of farm land, was to avoid the draft (low social trust). The slow rate of assimilation is also a signal that these were not people coming from a "high-social-trust" background.

You can see this with Italian immigrants to America. I’m in New Jersey right now, and recently was in Wyoming. These are obviously not the same people despite being “white.” They’re more different than Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and we fought a war to be separate from each other.

This is a MAGA talking point so there are people who agree with your take. I think that is an unreasonable and ridiculous position given its impossibility. In light of how much the US benefits from immigration overall, it’s also shortsighted.

Oh come on. Every human population has insane people. Lets not bite hook line and sinker into conservative biases.

The UK has significantly better integration than the continent in line with the other Anglosphere countries.

I agree it's not enough evidence for anything conclusive. But I think it's enough evidence to say arguing about what will happen to the US based only on Sweden data is unsound.

According to this statistic https://www.statista.com/statistics/1411761/australia-share-... Indigenous Australians are significantly overrepresented in the prison population. As of 2022, Indigenous Australians made up 31.8% of the prison population, despite constituting only about 3.3% of the total population. Because of this massive overrepresentation, it might well be that other non-white ethnic groups are underrepresented. It's statistic and doesn't tell why one minority ends up in jail so often.

This definitely wasn't true when I was researching during university (~2005). That was obviously a long time ago, so it's very plausible that things have changed. However, I'd want to see some very well-vetted data to believe it.

Whoa there - by your logic illegal immigrants should also keep their head down so they don’t get deported.

Also, how are legal immigrants “selected for positive traits”?

Canada has a much higher middle Eastern population than Sweden. Canada does not have a middle Eastern crime problem nor a middle Eastern unemployment problem.

I imagine the biggest difference is that the core of this group has been in Canada for almost 50 years.

Did western and eastern Germans had different languages? Different alfabet? Different religion?

Better comparison is to protestant Germans with Catholic French people.

Again, laying low is what illegal immigrants do. What “free cake” do illegal immigrants get? Shelter and food?

Just look at Georgia’s law a few years ago where they enforced strict paperwork with the threat of arresting the employer - probably the worst productive year for agriculture because they didn’t have cheap labor to rely on.

Enforce deportation to the greatest extent possible but be prepared to pay for it.

Of course there’s a risk of negative consequences. In fact, the US experiences many of them. But, it ultimately ends up stronger.

They are skilled. Try taking the best and brightest out of Silicon Valley and put them on farms, orchards, and in construction, and see how well they do.

This elitist attitude that low-paid workers are "unskilled" workers is bullshit and needs to go.

How can you call literally feeding the people “broadly unproductive”? It’s low margin, but you can’t have a society supporting your margins without someone doing the bottom jobs.

That's an economically illiterate comment. You're confusing scarcity of labor, which determines price, with the utility that that labor generates.

If we didn't have lower wage workers doing farm work food would be way more expensive and less diverse. I'm not sure how you judge the productivity of the worker...

Construction in a tight real estate market is broadly unproductive?

Both Dutch natives and EU-migrants are to be paid minimum wage, however it is a common trick when hiring migrants to charge them a ridiculous amount of rent for very sub-par accommodation nearby the jobsite. For example €600/month for a bunk-bed in a room with eight others. That is a way many temp agencies earn extra from migrants.

since they practically become indentured servants

Yup. A lot the cheap fruit + veg in the EU is thanks to back-breaking work by immigrants and the farm owners breaching their human and labour rights..

Who do you think is picking the fruit in the massive green house of southern spain? Not well-paid Spaniards I'll tell you - https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalcampaigns/agricultura...

The answer is NOT to bring the country down by mass-importing low skilled workers

My great grandparents came to this country as low skilled workers. I work with a second generation computer programmer whose parents came as unskilled workers. I know a guy from Guatemala who cleans houses and put his three kids through college. He just about explodes with pride when he talks about his kids.

Not everyone shares your views.

Part of what perpetuates this sort of thing is a general idea in society that one can’t do or learn something because that’s not possible for them. I’m of the opinion that if sufficiently motivated and with sufficient constraints removed, anyone can learn and do anything. The only difference between an engineer and someone breaking their back for work is that the engineer was probably coddled from birth into being told they can do anything including engineering. Not as a pipe dream but a clear path: take these classes, apply to this college, take this internship, take this job.

Meanwhile the laborer was probably told all their life they don’t have what it takes, either explicitly or not, and that thinking held them back their entire life. Why try hard in school if I am “not smart”? Why try and go to college if I can’t pay for it? Why not just do what my neighbor or my uncle does that I know is possible? Many people need to be reminded that everything is possible if they aren’t dissuaded by unhelpful ideas or people.

Why is it uncomfortable? It is the reality, and no one important wants to change it.

There are plenty of immigrants working under the table. And there are plenty of employers willing to hire them.

We do have it both ways.

It sounds like justification for a “slave” class to do undesirable jobs

It's the exact opposite. The slavery is being trapped in Cuba which the person decided to leave by their own free will to make it to America, where working a terrible factory job is going to make them ten times richer than they would have been otherwise.

Is you being uncomfortable with this idea actually more important than giving that person a shot to work himself to a normal American life within two decades and certainly for their kids?

What welfare costs are you referring to? Is there actual evidence that immigrants are a drain on the country? The information that I'm seeing suggests that they are a net positive in terms of taxes.

It takes energy to fight entropy.

I believe that the entropic state of human civilization is brutal authoritarianism.

Fight the current, indeed.

It's quite remarkable how effectively the citizens of the United States have managed to do that over the years. To resist the sweet, seductive lies of utopians who seek power.

I hope we're able to continue.

Hobbes doesn't get the last word on the natural state of mankind. Thank God.

There’s still work these people are finding in the US. Ever been to socal? Go to an el salvador neighborhood, one of the most recent immigrant communities. Absolutely buzzing with people going to their various jobs. Are they stamping out Fords? No. Pouring cement and hanging drywall maybe, or cooking on the line. There’s still plenty of work for people who can offer their time and their two hands over a credentialed resume in the US.

This is not behavior exclusive to immigrants though. Either way the welfare state is not very strong in the US. There are 75,000 homeless people in LA county for example.

Do you have some sources for your claim that MENA migrants are a net loss for Germany?

Only because Denmark does a bad job of integrating immigrants.

In countries like the US that are good at integrating immigrants, they are a huge net positive.

Are IT-sector workers even that low-paid in Canada anyway?

Apparently they are pooping on the beaches there.

I doubt you have many Mexican locals living next the the border literally walk across the border and then travel to the interior of the country. Most of them are from far away places and endure quite a challenging journey to get here. I live in San Jose in a neighborhood with many older Vietnamese boat people. Columbians have been moving in. There isn't an easy way to get from Columbia to Mexico by walking.

Crossing the Darién Gap: Migrants Risk Death on the Journey to the U.S.

https://www.cfr.org/article/crossing-darien-gap-migrants-ris...

To continue your thought: if they really opposed illegal immigration, there wouldn't be illegal migrants at all.

And how would you say that these two solutions are incompatible? How does delaying the replacement rate issue with immigration prevent solving the core problem, or are you just advocating for accelerationism?

I'm with you on this, but imagine being an American in prison for 10 years because you drilled a 1/8" hole .123" from the edge of a funny shaped piece of aluminum.

Cannot under any circumstances be circumvented.

Tangentially - I find it fascinating how the originalists on the supreme court get fuzzy on what a "well regulated militia" meant at the time the amendment was written.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_culture_in_the_United_Stat...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-gun-becam...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/13/key-facts...

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/fourth-july-musings-am...

https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/

It's a protected unalienable right. Cannot under any circumstances be circumvented.

Until the next amendment to it, be that in a couple of years or centuries

You inserted their speech where I said "capital and ability". Because you support undermining those rights so you play semantic games.

I never said I supported undermining any particular rights. The phrase "use their capital and ability to politically undermine our civil liberties" implies engagement in the political process, which implies free speech, which (notwithstanding your semantic games) is already established as legitimate.

I don't want to put words in your mouth

Yes you do, your comment here does so numerous times. So feel free to argue with the strawman, I'm out.

Immigrants don't need "our" permission to join "our" society, they only need the permission of the government, as a matter of legal formality. And of course one could argue that "illegal immigrants" are a part of society, just not legally, because societies aren't only defined in the context of states.

Also free speech is a universal value, is it not? It should apply equally to everyone, everywhere, all the time, and in all contexts.

American government since the beginning of the 20th century has been on a nearly uninterrupted trend of increasing state power, both domestically and internationally. Politicians sometimes pretend to be anti-government to get votes, but every administration spends more than the previous one.

I wouldn’t call that static.

Leftists will scream about civil rights.

(Except for that pesky Second Amendment)

The amount of room they give to interpret that vague statement however they want could fit an aircraft carrier. Their actual policy position is in their project 2025 materials and it curtails legal immigration pretty significantly along similar lines that trump attempted to tread in his first presidency.

In the last ten years or so, I came to understand the parable of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” in a visceral way. We can all see the viciousness and cruelty to scapegoats is Trump and the conservatives binding principal, and that they’ve settled in immigrants as that scapegoat without much regard to legal status. You can tell me all you want that the evidence of my eyes and ears is false, but I am not able to turn them off.

Meanwhile if we forget what his lips are doing and watch for the fist we’d see his republican party has a different agenda. Namely one about picking certain favorite nations and excluding others. Really just read the project 2025 materials and forget whatever tangents he goes on, as he doesn’t hold himself accountable to what he might say.

Why are some societies worse off than others, to the point where someone would need to move countries take their entitlements? Might it have something to do with what the entitled countries did to the ones that are worse off?

Agreed. That's where the question is really interesting, and important, though. If we can only have one or the other, and if a majority of Americans view our southern border as an untenable situation, can we maintain our entitlement programs?

Entitlement programs only work if we can secure our borders. If we can't secure our borders it seems to be clear that we can't have the entitlement programs.

I didn't say that anyone getting off a boat was doing it willingly. There are a ton of problems in US history related to slavery, not least of which how our founding fathers handled slavery while attempted to build a nation based on freedom and individual rights.

That's separate from the core topic here though. The slave trade and all the problems that go along with it do not change the fact that our borders were open for a majority of our history.

I don't know enough about the specific racial factors in our older immigration laws, I'll take your word for it, but there isn't anything linking the two. We could have open borders without entitlement programs or racist immigration laws.

To get more immigrants.

He said he liked legal immigration. So we can have more legal immigrants any time we want.

If they don't want to raise quotas then they don't really want legal immigrants. They just want to keep everyone out.

Poe's law strikes again. I'm unsure if you're being sarcastic or not. I think the consequences of our actions will find us one way or another regardless of immigration policy. That's not an argument against screening, but for policy reform.

If I can avoid dealing with the ruinous consequences of governments that existed before I was born, I absolutely will.

Did you find any assumptions in the references I provided? Since you evoked the cartels as a boogeyman it seems relevant to point out that they're one of our own creation. Changes to US policy no greater or more complex than those proposed for immigration could eliminate the economic conditions which drive their violence.

None of my family has been back in decades, we've long since abandoned it.

Also, that situation is a lot more likely to occur in the mother country than most people's host countries, if it doesn't happen already. There's a reason it was the East germans fleeing, and not the other way around.

They get a salary. And they spend it.

Thought experiment: If you removed half of the population of a country, would that make the rest of the country richer or poorer?

That said, it's pretty obvious that economic sanctions aren't bringing about regime change.

On the flip side, you have China, where US pretty much helped build up their economy and hoped for a peaceful and democratic outcome. How well did that go?

I find it odd when the left criticizes the US for supporting dictatorships in places like Iraq, South America, etc.

Then when it comes to Cuba, another dictatorship, the left complains the US is applying sanctions.

It seems inconsistent.

It may not in the short or medium term cause regime change, but sufficiently large sanctions on a country do stop it from growing in influence, wealth and power. Eventually, after some number of generations, Cuba could be so poor in comparison to the rising tide of the rest of the world, that it's not even able to defend itself or maintain government control. At some point, the disparity in power becomes overwhelming and you have super high tech society surrounding stone age cave men.

we don't want to fund what their government is doing

What is their government doing that is so terrible?

Anyway let's suppose Cuba is a brutal dictatorship, even though it really isn't by any metric. Why are there no sanctions on Saudi Arabia? Why no sanctions on Taiwan during the white terror? Why no sanctions on Chile when they threw alive protesters from flying helicopters? I could go on for a while.

allying with them gives us little to nothing in return.

Recent events have shown that to be very much not the case. Over the past few weeks we've had news of the Russian Navy paying port calls and the Chinese building major signals intelligence capabilities. Wouldn't it be better to have them as an ally?

It's always interesting to contrast our relationships with Cuba vs Vietnam. We fought a long hot war with Vietnam yet today we have good relations with them. Obviously we can't say we would have a good relationship with Cuba if we had been nicer to them but it certainly makes me think.

We have sanctions on Cuba for the same reason we have sanctions on Russia and Venezuela

Many senior government officials over the years, including then Vice President Cheney, have plainly said that our interest in Venezuela is their oil. The sanctions, as in any country, are about wanting control over their resources.

Sorry, but I don’t think families who escaped in those times were exactly just innocent property owners.

Ah. So uk should sanction the whole USA, on account of that revolution that costed some people something?

In this scenario, should everyone born in the same city as you be punished for your crimes?

Oh, I get it. It’s just not gonna get them anything. That ship sailed decades ago. On a policy level, all this is doing is causing harm.

Depends; were I or my family aligned or complicit with a military dictatorship?

thanks for letting us know you never read a book and take lessons from the tv.

Native Americans called, they want their land back.

Still mad about Amalek.

Right. I still want back Constantinople.

Sometimes I want to but it's hard when every European country has tried to kill you. (Maybe there's one that was good to Jews, but I'm pretty sure there wasn't, for the simple reason that all the Jews would go there then, and the countries all the Jews went to, Spain and then Poland, then tried to kill us.) I don't want to have a grudge against a continent.

Obama did start warming relations, probably due to that shift. Trump reversed it. I expect it’ll continue to, at best, see-saw until Republicans are comfortable enough with their advantage in Florida to ignore the Cuban vote.

DeSantis won by 0.5% in 2018…

When was the last time it was up for grabs?

Obama won it in 2012.

That isn't that long ago in electoral cycles.

...are you seriously arguing for genocide?

Killing people who did nothing wrong always puts you on the right side.

you should really read on Cuba before comparing it to Serbia. completely different situation and the people fleeting it in the last decade is exclusively about the the embargo.

Off topic but, I am curious, why would people hate the people that produce their food? Seems like a footgun position to take.

I'm surprised at this take. It seems readily apparent that Cuban exiles want their countrymen and women to be free from state communist control and have the ability to speak their mind, practice economic freedom and their religion, which is I understand is very Catholic from Spanish influences. I don't know how you can say Cuban exiles want the people they left behind to suffer.

There seems to be a belief that if sanctions remain THIS YEAR, regime change will come to Cuba. It didn't work. Well, NEXT YEAR they will, they have to! Repeat for 50 years.

Most people fleeing Cuba blame current regime for their suffering with good reason. So they have a desire to see it overthrown.

People who left want to put pressure on the government that they hate and they don’t mind sanctioning the people to do it.

and agent orange, and destroy literally everything before we tail it back to our own country, not before we tell our vets to “suck it up” and bootstrap their PTSD due to exposure of aforementioned war crimes.

Ukraine is more then enough for Putin

What about propaganda where he will capture the whole EU after Ukraine?

What time was that? There aren't even ten nations in the EU with nuclear weapons.

By your comment, I assume that you don't see a difference between "not having a commercial relationship with a country" and "invading and annexing a country".

What I can't understand is WHY are the people who escaped for a better life, pro embargo... What, 70 years later? Seems like it's only being highly effective at hurting the general population

the point is that if it's not a swing state politicians don't care about the state wants. so the embargo might fall to the sidelines

Would it have really? I'm not particularly up to speed on the situation in Cuba, but there are a lot of awful regimes on this planet that remain in power simply because they have all the guns. These regimes are unpopular, they govern poorly, but no one can do anything about it, because the guns, tanks and soldiers are all under their control, and they've decided that a peaceful transition of power is not an option they wish to entertain. It's entirely possible for this to be a stable state that lasts for a lifetime.

If we assume that sanctions are the major barrier to Cuba's prosperity, a competent government that governed with the best interest of its people in mind would have been working for the past half century to try and convince the United States to lift those sanctions.

You would think that being less than 500 miles off the coast of Florida that Cuba would want to have strong relations with the USA rather than Russia over 6,000 miles away.

The Soviet Union fell in 1991. It should have been clear since then which horse Cuba should be betting on. Cuba has had 33 years to figure out that their revolution was dead. Their lack of success warming up relations with the USA and their failure to do so is on them.

The US has been the the only major country sanctioning Cuba for a decade and a half

Which is enough, as the US controls the emission of dollars, have monopolies over several technologies and, as it extends the sanctions even to the ships that trade in Cuba, disallowing them to enter in US, on practice it difficult trades between Cuba and any other country.

It doesn't explain why Cuba needs to import 70-80% of their food despite being a fertile tropical paradise.

Modern agriculture depends on machines and fertilizers. And if you go without modern technology, climate change and shortages of water can be an even greater blow to your production. You will produce food, but will be susceptible to famine crisis, as were all countries before sufficient technological development.

Moreover, Cuba is also not an agrarian country. The urban population is greater than the rural, like in any modern country. Remember that societies without much technology had to have a much greater part of population in rural areas instead of cities to be self-sufficient in food.

It doesn't explain why Cuba needs to import 70-80% of their food despite being a fertile tropical paradise.

There have been famine and starvation before the communists took power. I don't think Cuba has ever been fully food self-sufficient. Not many countries are.

Not to mention agriculture needs access to fertilizers which the sanctions make harder to get.

The more important part from your source:

The largest island in the Caribbean, Cuba is one of the most successful in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Food-based social safety nets include a monthly food basket for the entire population, school feeding programs, and mother-and-child health care programs.

This is a big achievement.

Also it doesn't make sense to compare Cuba with the richest Western Countries. Communist revolutions tend to happen in the poorest countries of the world. Saying they are poor because of communism is confusing cause and effect.

If we compare Cuba to her peers in Latin America, especially Haiti, then Cuba is doing vastly, vastly better. Cuba is doing really well on the human development index, providing free health care and decent education for all.

The US has been the the only major country sanctioning Cuba for a decade and a half

It's had an embargo against Cuba since 1962.

Cuba’s attitude towards US sanctions is: “bring them on!”

Even before Castro came to power, Che Guevara planned in enacting extreme tariffs to keep American money out. He used 19th century American tariffs to justify this.

Cubas government is far more interested in maintaining control than opening up to trade.

They are willing to advertise to tourists, which brings in cash without shaking things up.

But they aren’t willing to make the adaptations international trade requires.

The US excluding otherwise Visa Waiver Program (VWP), aka ESTA, eligible citizens from using VWP if they have visited Cuba since since 2021 is probably bad news for Cuba.

Bad news for citizens of these countries that would have visited Cuba if they also want to visit USA and don’t want to bother with US visas:

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/tourism-...

Opinions like these are the reason why this “communism v capitalism” discussion never evolves beyond “them bad us good”.

China is often the target of anti communist propaganda so how do you square that hole? 1# economy when looking at GDP(PPP) so your “analysis” falls short.

Communist “regimes” often have to deal with outside interference from the “superior” capitalist system.

OP’s point is extremely valid: Cuba does not have the right to self determination as other countries impose themselves on them and prevent their economic growth.

The Cuba case is really quite interesting when you compare it to more recent cases of indivisibility of security.

We all have short memories I guess, super heros and cartoon villains.

Never change hn.

since most communist countries do very poorly economically.

It’s almost as though being brutally sanctioned by a superpower makes it nearly impossible to succeed. Do you not see the irony of your statement?

The sanctions in Venezuela are/were very different from the ones in Cuba, there is a prohibition of trade from any US company and its subsidiaries with Cuba with the exception of food, not some specific sectors aimed at supposedly weakening the government.

With that being said it could also be incompetence and/or corruption, but ignoring the embargo completely is just working to weaken your argument.

Khmmm... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mongoose

Its pretty much a given that that level of resources will be less than a capitalist nation.

Why?

If we accept the axiom that each person wants to maximize their resources, then we should expect a natural outflow from the [poorer] nation to the [richer] one. In order to limit that, any ruler would be incentivized to pain the [rich] world as the enemy or make it a crime to affiliate/sympathize with them. this naturally leads to conflict between nations.

(I replaced communist/capitalist with poor/rich since that's what your point is actually about.)

Are you saying that the poor world is naturally the enemy of the rich world? That the rich world should utilize its power (e.g. using sanctions) to keep the poor world (which in your view is the enemy) weak?

That's a fair point. One thing I will say, having lived near many in FL at one time, they are some of the most patriotic and pro USA people. I always appreciated that in a way, as I think a lot of us take it for granted.

Definitely selection bias but well-founded.

The unmotivated masses tend to follow the de-facto system that entrenches the successful few. The remaining motivated and competitive people on the other hand leave for better pastures.

People who emigrate from countries whose governments micromanage the population tend to have the worst opinion about them. Not that dissimilar from people who ditch bosses who micromanage =).

moving to a different country with a different language.

The US doesn't have an official language, there are areas that speak almost exclusively spanish. All government shit is available in spanish. Puerto Rico speaks spanish. Over a fifth of Floridians speak spanish at home.

Political power from Florida stemming from Batista supporters.

Last I heard Batista's daughter is homeless, support doesn't look so great lol: https://www.local10.com/news/2017/06/21/ex-cuban-leader-fulg...

I keep seeing this "expansionist dictatorship" applied to China when the USA is discussed. The USA has invaded plenty of countries in the last few decades, has a history of colonialism (Cuba, Philippines, Puerto Rico...sure, less than some European countries, but still).

Which countries has China invaded in the past few decades?

Cuba was in the "attempt to alter the status quo via forceful revisionism" club. They had literally thousands of soldiers and "advisors" in various hot spots, trying to export the revolution.

That was the 1970s, though. Cuba was allegedly involved in the coup in Venezuela in 1992; arguably, the chavismo government would not have happened without Cuban involvement. That government still rules Venezuela.

Are they still trying to stir up trouble? If not, how long ago did they stop? I don't know. But there definitely were reasons to impose sanctions on Cuba.

What does any of what you said have to do with the US though?

it ain’t going to do anything about it because it can’t

And, it can't because it's too poor to be able to do anything, which is partly a result of the sanctions.

If you open up trade they will become stronger. Look at China before and after we opened up trade with them. What happens of Cuba becomes more powerful and is still hostile while being so close to the US?

People make this argument - but it’s consistent through history with moderates as well as non-moderate government. Withdrawing support is always seen as weakness an established state and leads radicals to overthrow governments. Germany 1931(bankers withdrew funds), Afghanistan, Cuba, Vietnam.

Hmm, I'm seeing a different story in the World Bank's data[1] for GPD per capita, PPP adjusted. It shows the US in 12th place.

Regardless, I'm happy to cede this point as it's irrelevant to the topic I was discussing: Cuba isn't that poor compared to its peers.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?most_...

So like normal law then?