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Mark's avatar

Given that Medicare and Medicaid can't and won't survive without each other, I don't think we can dismiss the connection between low-wage employers dumping their employees onto Medicaid and the pending entitlement crisis.

The Springfield situation is Exhibit A of the risk for immigration done disastrously wrong. We've bequeathed their employers both the labor supply, through a work permit gimmick, and their compensation package by allowing them to dump said guest workers onto the Medicaid rolls. It's unsustainable both politically and financially, but I got no sense from Biden or the Democrats that they saw a problem with it.

I don't dispute your premise that more immigration will be needed to prop up both economic growth and entitlement financing, but we needed to foster a culture where the public's intuitive skepticism about immigration could be minimized to accomplish the needed political environment to pull that off. Instead, we spent three years pretending there was nothing we could do to stop 10 million people from crossing the border and then slipped in a backdoor guest-worker program to funnel refugees into manufacturing jobs that pay so low that their workers are all signing up for Medicaid.....even as American citizens are told Medicaid is approaching bankruptcy. It's hard to imagine a more perfect blueprint to destroy our chances at winning over the public on immigration.

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Toiler On the Sea's avatar

I'm not claiming the Biden Admin's response to the record-migrant surges at the border was sound, just saying we have to acknowledge trade-offs in pursuing a more restrictive immigration policy to having to reform entitlement programs sooner (just like there are tradeoffs to a more open borders immigration policy both positive and negative).

The right wing is completely oblivious and/or refuses to acknowledge that reality, whereas the left usually just pivots to "we can soak the rich out of the problem" and with immigration, is struggling to grapple with the fact that strong pluralities if not outright majorities of Western electorates want to slow down immigration rates regardless.

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