Look, you’re demanding I present counter arguments to statements that literally aren’t argued. Your entire position is effectively “this is bad because I say it is” so of course I’m not going to spend time and energy to counter that. Explain the actual mechanism of harm without resorting to “it’s clear from history” or “it’s a textbook recipe that leads to collapse.” I mean, if you are making your statements disingenuously as I suspect, that’s fine, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you’re in fact sincerely not understanding how you are in no way making logical arguments but just rattling off conclusions.

So, here are some actual facts. Immigration of all stripes has been pretty thoroughly shown to only improve economies in terms of productivity and diversity. Immigrants, no matter what, pay substantially into the system, and thus enable scaling of the resources only some of them end up benefiting from. Immigrants, again of all varieties, are significantly less likely to engage in crime than their native-born counterparts. These are all well established in the literature, so I will take them as axiom.

Given the above, your hypothesized concerns simply don’t track as population flows scale. Crime rates don’t increase (actually go down), economies don’t implode (actually improve), and social systems don’t collapse because they inherently scale in resource allocation proportionally to population (in a competently structured system–i.e., where this fails, it is not due to immigration but to extant deficiencies already in play).

Now, let’s address another deficiency in the “reasoning” you presented. People don’t just magically immigrate between countries, regardless of Immigration laws. Even if we had no borders and lived in a space age utopia, most people would nevertheless stay where they are unless that place was inhospitable to their survival–this isn’t to say there aren’t many economic migrants, but they are still inevitably a fraction of the population of their country of origin and so the naive assumption that “billions” would flow across an open border is just absurd and completely unreasonable.

Ultimately, understand that I am not expecting erasure of borders to happen anytime soon. However, yes, it is patently clear that the current “crackdown” on immigration is a solution looking for a problem so that it can justify totalitarian authoritarianism and immigration is not and has never really been a significant threat to the US, documented or no.

Most of these figures are guesses along a spectrum of “educated” since many models, like ChatGPT, are effectively opaque to everyone and we have no idea what the current iteration architecture actually looks like. But MIT did do a very solid study not too long ago that looked at the energy cost for various queries for various architectures. Text queries for very large GPT models actually had a higher energy cost than image gen using a normal number of iterations for Stable Diffusion models actually, which is pretty crazy. Anyhow, you’re looking at per-query energy usage of like 15 seconds microwaving at full power to riding a bike a few blocks. When tallied over the immense number of queries being serviced, it does add up.

That all said, I think energy consumption is a silly thing to attack AI over. Modernize, modularize, and decentralize the grids and convert to non-GHG sources and it doesn’t matter–there are other concerns with AI that are far more pressing (like deskilling effects and inability to control mis- and disinformation).

The only point you’ve made that has any real practical weight is the issue of labor exploitation of undocumented immigrants, which I agree is terrible, but even then you seem to not care as much about the inequity of it as much as that it “devalues citizenship,” whatever the fuck that is. None of your other points are more than baseless handwringing. Your argument about the legal ramifications is circular and based on nothing more than post hoc mental gymnastics to reach the unsupported conclusion you started with. Your economic argument is hollow and literally concludes that it isn’t important because your circular legal argument is what is important. The moral argument assumes a zero sum game and, again, is not based on anything factual. Finally, your security threat argument is evidenced by effectively nothing–the things you raise are threats regardless of immigration and are most actively guarded against at other points throughout their respective threat trajectory.

I think before you flap about complaining about education quality, you should reflect on your own reasoning as presented. You have applied zero logical process and effectively thrown a heap of conclusory axioms in the air and sputtered with indignation. You have effectively argued nothing and only shown your own severe lack of self-reflection.

What constitutes a legal channel is not “simple” and you’re either being disingenuous or are wildly ignorant of the practical reality of immigration. Regardless, it also is totally reasonable to believe that “circumnavigating immigration laws” is very much a non-issue and by and large it is totally unimportant whether an immigrant is documented or not, as far as the state is concerned–if anything, the state, such that it is a unitary entity with its own interests, benefits from undocumented immigrants as they pay into the system and minimally draw out of it (this is also a bad thing, imo, but I suspect we disagree on why).

It ia more nuanced than that. What makes immigration “illegal” is incredibly arbitrary and inconsistent as a matter of both practice AND law in the USA. Moreover, there are many who believe, as I do, that people have a right to try making a home wherever they are. Where immigration is a problem, it isn’t an immigration problem but rather a collapse of existing broken aspects of the society–the immigration pressure just brings these failings to light.

A country isn’t a house, it’s a place where people put their own houses/make their own individual homes. This analogy immediately falls apart as totally irrelevant bullshit before you even begin to dig into its internal failures of reasoning.

Water balloons of raccoon piss. It’s extremely pungent and effective at chasing away rats.

Apple is a trademarked brand name, but it’s far older than computers. Trademarks aren’t a blanket ownership of a word, they’re a disprovable presumption by a court that a trademark has a relationship, or may have soon, with s particular company in the minds of consumers.

Jaywalking isn’t an arrestable offense? What do you expect the government to do with those who flaunt traffic rules nonchalantly?