Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 04, 2023, 09:33 PMIf fascism whips up enough there won't be any immigration at all.  Not with legions of climate refugees on the seas.  Intensifying the global problem.

Also very true.  There is the old issue where people who are already here don't want to share what's left of their shrinking pie with newbies.  Never mind that basically everyone who lives here is a descendant of immigrants, with the exception of a vanishingly small percentage of 100% native aboriginals who mostly live in poverty on a few reservations.

New immigrants compete for housing with the locals, driving up the prices and making it still MOAR unaffordable.  Up here, Wasilla took in something like 2000 Ukrainian refugees, and there are like ZERO open apartments up there now for low income people.  Here in Anchorage I am on a Waiting List for Cook Inlet Housing, with a current estimate of a 6-18 month wait list.  They can't boot me out of my SNF which charges $16K/mo currently being paid almost in full for me by Medicare and Medicaid, but at the end of August my case gets reviewed and my bennies might get reduced, in which case they take all my retirement money and leave me a big $200/mo pocket money.

New immigrants also compete for shrinking Social Services, medical care, education for their kids etc.  Needless to say, none of these agencies are getting more money to provide their services, most of them are getting budget cuts as tax revenues dwindle in the latest economic slowdown, which is already in recession just not admitted to by the stats people officially.

Also presenting obstacles to expanding immigration is the endless War on Terror which labels just about everyone from a Muslim Country as a Terrorist and everyone from South and Central America a Drug Dealer.  About the only thing which might be a little better is racism, since so many Brown and Asians have added to the Black immigrant population already here that all together it's probably close to even with the White population.  Of course, we still do have the local Neo-Nazis protesting further immigration by any non-white populations, aka everybody except Eurotrash.

So to return to the Grid buildout problem, it doesn't seem likely that they will be able to expand the workforce rapidly enough to do the extensive kind of construction necessary inside a 12 year window, even IF the money and the metals were magically available, which they are not.

Despite the fact this should be clear to anyone with half a brain, you still have talking heads from Think Tanks and Political Policy groups hanging the blame here on Regulatory complexity, which is a problem but by no means theworst or biggest problem.  Nobody will admit the problem either, right up to the day EV owners plug in at the local charging station and they hang out the "Out of Juice" sign.

RE