From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Thu Jun 27 2002 - 22:07:25 MDT
Anders Sandberg wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 05:53:09PM -0400, Mike Lorrey wrote:
>
> Exactly my point! Not everything the Chinese government is evil/stupid,
> but one should always be careful about ideas one finds oneself sharing
> with it.
>
> Prime minister Göran Person told the media recently that he was all for
> labour immigration, but only after all Swedes and current immigrants had
> jobs. Which is a way of saying "never" that sounds nicer - but it is
> still both a stupid and immoral policy. The same goes for most other
> applications of "you can get X, but only after you have achieved Y".
>
I disagree. I've seen estimates that due to the economic and
especially tech sector crunch there are on the order of half a
million highly trained American technical workers unemployed.
At the same time we want to increase the number of H1B visas for
lower cost foreign technical workers. Free trade is fine but
failing to take care of people or leave any room for them to
exercise their skills without vastly lowering their standard of
living leaves much to be desired in our so-called "progress" as
far as it is manifest at the social and economic level of
people's lives.
There is nothing a priori immoral about taking care of the
people already in one's constituency before adding to their
numbers. There is nothing a priori moral about wide-open
immigration without consideration of its effects. I thought we
generally agreed here that morality is not a matter of absolutes
in the first place. So how can it be "immoral" to consider the
relative harm and benefit of a particular action at a particular
time and place?
- samantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:15:04 MST