Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

The rules created by a democratic process of course. As voted on by the citizens of a country.

That's how sovereignty works. Or are you advocating for removal of sovereignty for the economic benefit of citizens of other countries because "that's more moral"? Hardly.

View on HN

Citizens in the US voted for Jim Crow and it was only overturned via non-democratic means. Were these laws moral at the time?

To take a modern example, will Maharashtra's proposed law against Biharis driving autos be moral if it has popular support? (Background: Marathi nationalists have - this year - proposed Jim Crow type laws against non Marathis driving taxis/auto rickshaws.)

The Jim Crow laws were most certainly overturned through democratic means, namely the 1964 Civil Rights Act (an act of the elected legislature) invoking the Commerce Clause (part of the Constitution) and 1965 Voting Rights Act. If you mean they were not repealed through by referendum or plebiscite, that is true, but neither were they enacted through direct voting. This is the case with most laws in the US.

I'm guessing by 'non-democratic' means, he was referring to Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

I actually misremembered which was ended by law and which by judicial fiat. Regardless, the moral question of whether they were justified when democratically popular remains.

Yes. And as citizens (of various countries), that's what we're arguing. Just because citizens set the rules doesn't mean whatever they decide is necessarily just.

EDIT: In reply to your edit, I have no idea why you'd bring up "removal of sovereignty". I don't see anyone here even hinting at that.

I don't know precisely what "removal of sovereignty" means, but I suspect it means that undocumented immigrants undermine USA laws, by routinely breaking them. Even from the outside that seems different than debating (and voting) what the laws should be... One suspects you'd be more sensitive to this difference if the laws in question were those that you strongly support.

The questioning of my support of sovereignty came in reply to my post saying the question is what the laws/rules should be. If the sovereignty worry is about illegal immigration, then the reply makes no sense in the context of my post.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com