The most expensive,scarce, irreplaceable, capital that people produce and consume is normative and intertemporal.The physical universe can be physically transformed.But people must be trained by immersion,education,competition, incentives,and law. A sh–hole is so b/c its people.
Bringing money to ‘bad people’ merely feeds bad behavior. Basic economic law: anything you subsidize will increase. Bad people bringing money to worse people produces malincentives at source and destination. Bringing bad people to good people is costly.
The economics of immigration is contentious only because we do not measure the changes in capital, only the change in productivity (lowering) and consumption (only maintained by increasing population). Not that you’re likely able to have this discussion with me.
For the temporal and experiential *animal, consumption is an understandable measurement of ‘success’. For the intertemporal, empirical and cumulative *human, consumption without a decline in intertemporal capital is a measurement of ‘success’.
The temporal and consumptive, vs intertemporal and cumulative, is the causal difference in gender, class, tribal, cultural, national group reproductive and evolutionary strategies, and is the source of our ‘moral’ perceptions, and political expressions of those perceptions.
For those with the western aristocratic (meritocratic) high trust, low corruption, high investment commons, whose sentiments favor empirical rule of law over justificationary rationalism and rule by discretion, we are conscious of, concerned with, the defense of, those commons.
You get what you measure.