To think it’s easier to want open boarders if you’re privileged?

[Theselfishsister]

Having an ongoing conflict with my sister regarding refugees, she’s very ‘let everyone in’ I would say I’m somewhere in the middle.

She’s given up spare bedrooms to refugees, spends weekends in Calais helping them and is posting everywhere on SM about letting them all in. As well as attending protests regularly for the last 4 years or so.

What strikes me is that her and her other friends going to all of the events are white, MC (although she is by marriage, we grew up very WC) and live incredibly comfortably. She’s a SAHM and her husband owns his own company, they have never needed benefits or social housing and her children are privately educated with all of them receiving private medical care.

A massive increase in people here are unlikely to ever have much affect on her life, she won’t have to fight for jobs or wait for a house or deal with benefit cuts when too much is paid out, as well as the increase in waits for Medical care and school admissions. Whereas for someone like me, this is obviously a more worrying factor and the thought of just opening our borders to everyone does scare me. As much as I would love to be able to take every person fleeing a great life, it just causes me worry and I don’t think I could support completely open boarders.

She obviously just thinks I’m a selfish heartless bitch for not protesting to remove our borders or similar. When I asked why she let refugees sleep in her spare rooms but never the homeless man on the road behind her (who’s been in the same spot since she moved there 5 years ago!) she called me a racist!

So AIBU to think it’s easier to want open boarders if you’re privileged or am I just a selfish cow?

Also there are studies that do show a negative effect in wage suppression (in the USA at least) for blue collar jobs. This is sometimes masked when looking at the overall economic effects of immigration.

In fact, it’s one of the reasons that the right-wing was/still is supportive of immigration. Democrats were traditionally the ones who had the interests of the working class in mind.

"Does anyone actually believe the official figures on mass immigration not affecting lower income jobs?"

As the evidence can't be found for it having the massive detrimental effect it is claimed? Yes you should believe it.

Even the UK government's own research into it published last week found that the fall in the pound because of the Brexit vote has had a larger impact on real wages in the time since the referendum, than immigration had since 2004.

Very, very weird and actually creepy. For goodness sake op you need to inform social services right away. There is no way a recently bereaved man, with no experience of babies, would be given an unrelated newborn

He hasn’t said the baby is unrelated. Just that it’s not his. The OP seemed to think he was a relative eg said ‘Dad’s side’. Just because the Dad can’t currently care for the baby doesn’t mean he doesn’t intend to in the future and is prepared to put the child up for adoption. Fostering in family is often preferred to fostering out as children have better outcomes with birth relatives than they do in long term foster care.

Oops. Wrong thread.