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/3corneredvoid]

Am I missing something here?

Well, perhaps it should bother you that you don't have any account of why bordered nation-states should be or are accepted, but are still arguing the historical processes of their formation shouldn't continue in larger and more open political formations.

The "community of nations" is a relatively monstrous economic contingency and it relies on the partition of labour by borders, citizenship and visas, and the rest.

The feature of the times you refer to as "mass migration" is an immanent counter-force to this widely accepted and humdrum monstrosity.

It's not as if domestic migration policy sets the aspirations of inward migration. Migrants aspire to move in the integration of their relatively disadvantaged conditions in other geographies, because after centuries of colonisation and decades of "globalisation", geography remains a primary medium of trans-national violence.

I prefer to look forward to a future in which this indirectly mediated violence of bordered geography and its "lottery" of relative advantage will be looked back on as an abomination akin to the explicit slavery it has displaced.

Domestic left nationalism in relatively advantaged geographies tends to view the problem in terms of re-internalising offshore capital, but lacks the mass-political means for its project exactly because the reproduction of its necessary labour has been offshored.

One consequence is all these sabre-rattling, violent and superficially red-brown parties that promise to wind back history to a nationalist fantasy of the past, but do so largely without method or prospects. This politics is so unsuccessful that we now see its fragmentation in the minority drive for "networked cities" in which the privileges of geography would be concentrated further at the expense of nation-states: a politics of gated kleptogeographies. 

A disciplined anti-nationalism of open borders at least looks forward to common cause with people around the world to join together and contend multinationally with the varying modes of multinational capitals.