There’s a relatively recent joke in Western political circles that governments increasingly would prefer to replace the voters instead of the voters replacing the government.

Looking at the latest immigration data from Stats NZ it would seem that TPTB are now fully engaged in this process in New Zealand. I expect it to accelerate under a National-ACT government.

Of course we don’t know how many in that last category were immigrants in the first place who have gained NZ citizenship and then leveraged that to escape to even better places overseas. But it’s fair to assume at this point in time that the bulk of them are native-born Kiwis.

For a pure Libertarian like Bob Jones this doesn’t matter:

Such a global existence as I’ve had kills any nationalistic sentiment and in its place one treats different people as members of a single entity, namely the human race.
…
As I’ve frequently written, the Asian migration of the past three decades has been the best thing by a country mile, ever to have happened to New Zealand. They’re industrious and independent and I shudder at the thought of the state we’d be in had they not come.

Similarly for Objectivist Peter Cresswell:

  • Just a bigoted state [update 4]
    Contains a large number of interesting articles arguing for unlimited immigration (“which provide whole magazines full of ammunition against the bigoted and the ill-informed”) and dropping the whole idea of illegal immigrants (not such a problem for NZ).
  • “Open Borders Are a Trillion-Dollar Idea”
    A brief summary of some of Caplan’s “keyhole solutions” for the American immigration scene is found here (so you don’t have to read the whole book):
     If immigrants hurt American workers, we can charge immigrants higher taxes or admission fees, and use the revenue to compensate the losers. If immigrants burden American taxpayers, we can make immigrants ineligible for benefits. If immigrants hurt American culture, we can impose tests of English fluency and cultural literacy. If immigrants hurt American liberty, we can refuse to give them the right to vote. Whatever your complaint happens to be, immigration restrictions are a needlessly draconian remedy.

I’ve been meaning for some time to write an entire post on Caplan’s “Trillion-Dollar Idea” but suffice to say the basic problem is that none of those solutions have even been proposed in legislation, let alone implemented, nor will they be while there are American political forces that see huge advantages to the status quo. I suppose it’s possible that Caplan and company see open borders as a way of ending our social welfare systems – a sort of mirror-image of Cloward-Piven Strategy – but it has about as much chance of success (I’ve always wondered why Cloward-Piven were so certain there would not be a counter-revolution that produced results opposite to what they expected; I’m guessing Marxist ideas that the Toiling Masses would outnumber Rich Pricks).

Back in New Zealand the thing is that we don’t seem to be getting richer with all this immigration but poorer, which is why local, native Kiwis (especially if they’re well educated and/or skilled) are heading overseas as fast as they can for higher wages and a lower cost of living (notably with housing), while new immigrants are grateful even for our increasingly pitiful wages.

For example our retirement homes would not be able to operate were it not for people from East Asia – especially the Philippines. How much longer that will continue to be true, as developing countries continue to economically grow faster than us, is up for debate, but the trend is clear that we’re losing ground.

That means that there are other problems that we haven’t solved and what the data above suggests is that immigration is simply being used as a patch over those problems – including replacing voters who “object” to the low wages and salaries, and the lack of upward mobility, by leaving the nation, with voters who just accept what they get because it’s (so far) better than what they escaped. The attitude of TPTB seems to be, “Fuck ‘im. We’ll just hire an immigrant for the job”.