Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

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You seemed to forget some of these gems:

- The collapse of race relations. Everybody thought a black president would do wonders for the issues of race in this country, it's done just the opposite.

- Several ongoing wars with seemingly no end in sight.

- The illegal immigration ahem "undocumented workers" (for you PC types) issue. 42 million strong at this point and no signs of slowing down. This is quickly approaching a crisis point.

- Government spying, cryptography and the NSA. Snowden's leaks and how much the government really needs to keep us safe and what they're doing with the loads of data they're gathering every day.

- The economy and the recent stagnation and recession already occurring in several areas of the country. More capitalism, less government regulation, or should government be even more involved in regulating business?

There's plenty more, but these were off the top of my head. Ask anybody about one of these topics and they'll most likely give you a fairly polarizing view of where they stand.

I have never heard the claim of 42 million before. I have investigated only to the point of looking in Wikipedia, but they claim closer to 11 million, which is down from the peak number. Where are you getting that from?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_Uni...

The total number of immigrants (i.e. foreign-born persons) in the US is at 45 million right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_immigrant...

About 11 million of those are illegal/undocumented immigrants. The remaining 34 million are people on visas, people with green cards ("lawful permanent residents"), and naturalized citizens of the United States. This does not include the children born to them, who are natural-born citizens, and are thus not counted as immigrants.

45 million is 14.3% of the US population, which might seem high, but if the list on Wikipedia is sorted by % of population, the U.S. is nowhere on the top of the list. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Ireland, Austria, Singapore, etc. all have more immigrants per capita than the United States. And gulf countries like the U.A.E. and Qatar have the highest.

Maybe including children? IIRC the 'going down' stat doesn't include them.

>- The collapse of race relations. Everybody thought a black president would do wonders for the issues of race in this country, it's done just the opposite.

I don't understand what you mean. Today we're actually starting to have conversations about race and how the establishment treats people of different races instead of not even addressing the issue. It's being talked about not as a serious issue rather than some fringe thing that most people don't care about.

I feel like progress was made during the civil rights era, then things stagnated for 40-50 years, and now we're having conversations again. It sounds to me like a black president or perhaps other things going on have done wonders for issues of race in the country. It hasn't solved the problems yet, but it's sure brought them front and center and helped given them the attention they actually deserve instead of letting them get swept under the rug.

So you think "race relations" were better during the Reconstruction period? I don't.

The point here isn't that there aren't disagreements.

It's obvious he's comparing to 90s and early 2000s. Originally I assumed things are the same, but people are just louder because of Internet. Then birthers and Trump happened, so I think it's debatable.

I don't know that it's obvious, or even who you mean by "he." But anyway, the point I wanted to make is that the recent handwringing about "polarization" lacks any sort of historical perspective.

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