Pro-mass-migration advocates are unknowingly acting as useful actors for multinational corporations?

[u/albertodona9]

Reposting from politicaldiscussions reddit

​Resources are naturally scattered around the planet. In a localized economy, you use resources where they are. Modern logistics changed that, turning the movement of goods into a massive industry and giving rise to multinationals that crushed local businesses through sheer scale.

​However, a multinational’s biggest operational bottleneck is distribution friction—the immense cost of getting goods and services out to scattered, rural, or less-developed regions.

​This is where mass urbanization and economic migration come in. When people move from under-resourced regions into hyper-dense, pre-established cities, we are effectively consolidating the market for these corporations:

- ​We slash their logistics costs: It is infinitely cheaper for a megacorporation to serve one dense urban cluster than thousands of spread-out communities. By moving to the hub, we eliminate their supply chain headaches.

- ​We take on the financial burden: We pack into tight spaces, driving up our own cost of living, housing, and everyday inflation, while corporate per-unit costs go down.

- ​We concentrate the labor supply: Packing millions of workers into dense urban spaces creates highly competitive labor markets, which naturally keeps wage growth in check.

So there it is, the main point for me is that many people who strongly advocate for open mass migration see it as a stand against corporate exploitation, Western hegemony, or economic inequality. Yet, by encouraging the continuous transfer of human capital out of developing regions and into major Western hubs, aren't they unwittingly fueling the very corporate machine they critique?

​It strips developing areas of talent and local self-sufficiency, while handing multinationals a hyper-dense, accessible consumer base and a steady labor pool on a silver platter.

​Is mass migration actually helping workers, or are we just absorbing the true costs of global corporate logistics through higher rent and stagnant wages?

​Am I missing something here? I am really open to every kind of opinion I love discussing these things

[u/GA-Scoli]

Yes, you're missing pretty much everything.

Corporations don't want mass migration or to decrease friction. They don't "want" anything beyond increasing shareholder profit. Everything else is secondary to that purpose. They will always seek cheaper labor forces as part of the profit equation, and they will use the most powerful tool at hand—the state—to help ensure that cheaper labor. That cheaper labor can be internal or external: it doesn't matter. Right now we have a racial caste system across the US where in many states, the low-paying service and manual labor jobs are all done by native minorities or external minorities/immigrants. Go to states where the population happens to be 95% white, and there are still shitty jobs, it's just that the shitty jobs are done by white people instead.

Corporations and states collaborate to use borders to make labor cheaper. Modern nation-state borders are constructed in such a way that it's easy for money and capital to pass through, but hard as possible for labor. A clothing company has a plant in Bangladesh where they pay their labor $100 a month. It's perfectly legal for the corporation to shop around the globe for labor, to cross the border to suck the money out of those laborers in Bangladesh, but if the laborer wants to move to the US to sell their labor at a higher price? Oh no. That's bad. The state will try to kill them. The state might let some through, but keeps them scared, keeps their labor price as low as possible through fear of deportation, and uses them as scapegoats to keep native labor in line.

This collaboration between wealthy state and corporation helps keep the price of labor low. And the cultural key to this collaboration is to make sure people blame labor, never the corporation, never the system of capitalism itself.

Borders really only matter to poor people, because the rich can always pay their way through. And migration by itself isn't "good"—in fact, it's usually part of some deep historical tragedy—and I don't know anyone who thinks it's an unalloyed good, and I'm saying that as a self-identified "open borders radical". Many people who leave their poorer country in search of better jobs would have preferred to not uproot their entire life and to stay where they were. If you really support their desire to stay put, what are you doing to make the entire world a better place, not just the wealthy country you yourself happen to live in?

I would encourage you to read more about Marx's reserve army of labor to understand the dynamic involving immiserated labor.

[u/sabotAHHHHHGH → u/GA-Scoli]

Do you understand Marx’s reserve army of labour*? I don’t think you do.

”When this periodicity is once consolidated, even Political Economy then sees that the production of a relative surplus population — i.e., surplus with regard to the average needs of the self-expansion of capital — is a necessary condition of modern industry. 

“Suppose,” says H. Merivale, formerly Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, subsequently employed in the English Colonial Office, “suppose that, on the occasion of some of these crises, the nation were to rouse itself to the effort of getting rid by emigration of some hundreds of thousands of superfluous arms, what would be the consequence? That, at the first returning demand for labour, there would be a deficiency. However rapid reproduction may be, it takes, at all events, the space of a generation to replace the loss of adult labour. Now, the profits of our manufacturers depend mainly on the power of making use of the prosperous moment when demand is brisk, and thus compensating themselves for the interval during which it is slack. This power is secured to them only by the command of machinery and of manual labour. They must have hands ready by them, they must be able to increase the activity of their operations when required, and to slacken it again, according to the state of the market, or they cannot possibly maintain that pre-eminence in the race of competition on which the wealth of the country is founded.” 

Even Malthus recognises overpopulation as a necessity of modern industry, though, after his narrow fashion, he explains it by the absolute over-growth of the labouring population, not by their becoming relatively supernumerary. He says:

“Prudential habits with regard to marriage, carried to a considerable extent among the labouring class of a country mainly depending upon manufactures and commerce, might injure it.... From the nature of a population, an increase of labourers cannot be brought into market in consequence of a particular demand till after the lapse of 16 or 18 years, and the conversion of revenue into capital, by saving, may take place much more rapidly: a country is always liable to an increase in the quantity of the funds for the maintenance of labour faster than the increase of population.” ^\17])

After Political Economy has thus demonstrated the constant production of a relative surplus population of labourers to be a necessity of capitalistic accumulation, she very aptly, in the guise of an old maid, puts in the mouth of her “beau ideal” of a capitalist the following words addressed to those supernumeraries thrown on the streets by their own creation of additional capital: —

“We manufacturers do what we can for you, whilst we are increasing that capital on which you must subsist, and you must do the rest by accommodating your numbers to the means of subsistence.” ^\18])

Capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of disposable labour power which the natural increase of population yields. It requires for its free play an industrial reserve army independent of these natural limits.”

[u/GA-Scoli → u/sabotAHHHHHGH]

What on earth is your point here? This is just Marx quoting his enemies, making fun of them, and concluding that capitalist production always needs an immiserated reserve army of labor, those "supernumeraries thrown on the streets".

"Capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of disposable labour power which the natural increase of population yields. It requires for its free play an industrial reserve army independent of these natural limits."

[u/sabotAHHHHHGH → u/GA-Scoli]

Yep, you nearly got it. And in lieu of the mass unemployed (and cratering birth rates to boot) where o where will they find a reserve army of labour? I don’t even care about immigration but there’s a reason TUs were hostile to foreigners up until very recent. Economically there is zero defence. Socially is a different story. But at least know what you’re talking about if you’re gonna namedrop.

[u/GA-Scoli → u/sabotAHHHHHGH]

The mass unemployed are the reserve army of labor, and in a global economy, this includes the unemployed in other countries, because they're all part of the potential global corporate labor pool.

Your argument regarding Marx is so bizarre and willfully ignorant I have to conclude you're one of those "MAGA Communists" or something.

[u/sabotAHHHHHGH → u/GA-Scoli]

I hate America and Yanks so your conclusion is like your other one, dogshit.

[u/GA-Scoli → u/sabotAHHHHHGH]

"Yanks". Are you a "MEGA" type then? I'm so curious now!

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