Google Recalls Staff to U.S. After Trump Immigration Order | Hacker News Reader

Google Recalls Staff to U.S. After Trump Immigration Order

bloomberg.com

197 pointsENOTTY199 comments

I seriously doubt the intention of people behind this order has anything to do with security and safety of US citizens. In fact from my point of view, looking at the list of the countries which are banned you can see they could not care less about US citizens. For instance, for crying out load, 15 out of 19 hijackers involved in 9/11 were Saudi citizens. But why Saudi Arabia is not in the list? This is just a game of politics.

No country on that list has had a national commit an act of terror on US soil since 1975 or so.

Nor do any of them have Trump brand hotels in them.

> No country on that list has had a national commit an act of terror on US soil since 1975 or so.

See? It's working already!

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

And the other four were from Egypt, Lebanon and the UAE, also not on the list. Yet the EO starts by using the September 11 attacks as an example of the consequences of not vetting foreign nationals thoroughly.

I am not a Trump fan. On the contrary, I'm more one of his biggest opponents of him and ALL what he stands for but the list of countries banned from entering the US and referenced in the text in his EO -- 8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(12)--[0] is compiled by the SoS before him coming in office.

He's just riding on the coattails of former admins to expand the scope of the restrictions and sanctions imposed by them.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1187

But, the order seems illegal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/opinion/trumps-immigratio...

It's hard to take the NYT or WaPo seriously when they say something trump has done is illegal. If they were right before then we wouldn't be here and trump would have already been denied office or been impeached on day 1.

Ad hominem. The NYT has cited legal precedence in that article. Besides, it is an opinion piece by David J. Bier who is an immigration policy analyst.

I'm not dismissing the argument outright, i'm just giving my opinion piece ;)

Your opinion "piece" wasn't on the content of the article but who wrote it. ;)

Nope, wrong again.

It was on who published it ;)

The NYT is a company, it can't write articles, only people can

Look at my original comment, when did I even come close to mentioning the author or his track record in particular? I mention the NYT and WaPo.

You just committed the inverse fallacy of appeal to authority.

The parent observed that writers in the NYT, whether opinion writers or not, have an established track record of crying wolf in this regard. Pointing out a group or even an individual's track record is not an ad hominem attack because it's an argument about their argument, not their person.

Nope.

1) The said person dismissed my argument because of WHO wrote it. Classical ad hominem.

2) I did not say my argument was correct BECAUSE it was written by an immigration expert. Hence, not appeal to authority.

This is an opinion piece featured on NYT not their official position where they usually publish under the label "Editorial" and authored by "THE EDITORIAL BOARD".

Did you know that the NYT & WaPo have published factually correct articles before?

It's an opinion piece, not a news article.

Just because something is illegal, doesn't mean you are instantly clapped in irons and hauled off to jail. Especially if you are the President. This particular issue will take months or years to work out.

No, it isn't normal or some continuation of normal to ban people WITH GREEN CARDS from getting on planes to the US based on their being muslim. Jesus Christ.

This is your DHS acting or overreacting in reaction to this EO. I didn't say that it's normal or non-normal, I just said that the list of those designated countries is compiled by the Secretary of State prior to Trump taking office and not arbitrary like some people think.

Just because it was compiled by the Secretary of State, does not make it any less (or more) arbitrary.

I agree it's politics, no argument there. Perhaps the Saudi question has to do with ISIS instead of Al Quiada being the enemy?

Omar Mateen the pulse gay club muslim killer from Florida is Afghan. Why is Afghanistan not in the list?

Actually he was American born but don't let the facts get in the way: "Mateen was born Omar Mir Seddique[6] on November 16, 1986,[7] in New Hyde Park, New York, to Afghan parents."

It's surprising that countries such as Canada, Australia and EU nations are not making any attempt to lure tech companies and students from countries affected by the executive orders. The US is literally leaving some of the best students, researchers and highly qualified employees out in the cold.

In the long term, if this madness persists, of course they will. Companies and skilled individuals are transnational now, and if you try to shut them in or make travel impossible, they'll just leave and set up somewhere else, or never come and found new companies in the first place.

I think Trump and his supporters are playing by an outdated rule book and think they can turn the clock back on globalisation and force companies and people to stay within their borders however uncomfortable he makes it. There is a very similar dynamic going on with Brexit in the UK, but this will take years or decades to play out.

> There is a very similar dynamic going on with Brexit in the UK

the situation in the UK is very different, the political class are still entrenched and not going anywhere, whereas the US seems to be having a clean sweep

Theresa May's position that the UK is still open to globalism and wants to sign as many free trade agreements, and reduce barriers to trade as far as possible as the UK leaves the EU.

On the contrary, I think the situation in the UK is very similar - nationalism and patriotism are being exploited to sell people a story of immigrants taking their jobs, lowering wages and causing crime. It's an old story but entirely false. Almost all the tech leaders in the US today are immigrants - e.g. Musk, Ellison, Brin, Yang, Bell, Omidyar. Even Jobs was the son of a Syrian immigrant.

As to Trump being a clean sweep, there's nothing clean about his cabinet or advisors - he has one of the most traditional, male, rich, white cabinets in recent history and even includes family in his inner circle and in meetings. I don't think it's clean in any sense, neither new nor free of corruption.

> I think the situation in the UK is very similar - nationalism and patriotism are being exploited to sell people a false story of immigrants taking their jobs, lowering wages and causing crime.

I haven't seen any evidence of this, outside of the tabloids (which would be business as usual)

> As to Trump being a clean sweep, there's nothing clean about his cabinet or advisors - he has one of the most traditional, male, rich, white cabinets in recent history and even includes family in his inner circle and in meetings.

clean sweep as in the old guard and their policies are gone (not the case in the UK)

I haven't seen any evidence of this, outside of the tabloids

Recent examples from the conservative conference:

Exhibit 1: Amber Rudd vows to stop migrants 'taking jobs British people could do' and force companies to reveal number of foreigners they employ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/04/jeremy-hunt-nhs-d...

Exhibit 2: On immigration and jobs, Theresa May employs the post-truth politics of Donald Trump http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/05/on-immigration-an...

Exhibit 3: Official policy is to cut migration to tens of thousands (that order of magnitude cut would leave many industries short of staff with an ageing population)

yep, I knew the Amber Rudd speech would be in your reply to my comment.

1) has been thoroughly debunked: she never said what the press accused her of saying. try and find the speech where she's talking about employers making lists of foreigners... you won't be able to because it doesn't exist.

I looked quite extensively at the time for it, as I was horrified by what press were reporting her as saying... shame it's fake news.

(in actual fact it was one of many potential ideas in a briefing note before the speech)

2) is an opinion piece, not evidence

It's not fake news in the sense that the proposal was never made. She just didn't make it in her speech. So it was more a case of sloppy reporting by some newspapers. Here's what the Guardian says about it:

"The speech was followed by a background briefing by an aide who suggested firms could be required to publish lists of foreign workers. Rudd herself confirmed the next day that such lists were an option, but the idea was quickly dropped." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/12/amber-rudd-...

And I should add that the idea was dropped only after an outcry by businesses.

The fact that the proposal was made in written rather than spoken form is supposed to matter, how? She certainly did make the proposal, and defended it afterwards. Not "fake news" by any stretch of the imagination.

misreporting "we could do this" as "we promise we will do this" counts as fake news in my book

headline: "Amber Rudd vows to ... force companies to reveal number of foreigners they employ"

simply not true, so it's fake news

1) She proposed the idea, on briefing notes or in the speech, it doesn't really matter.

2) You missed the direct quote from May in the article? Her opinions are very clear on this and neatly mirror Trump's populist nationalism. To quote directly, she claims that British people are:

out of work or on lower wages because of low-skilled immigration

Given that employment is close to an all time low and most products bought are imported and thus nothing to do with low skilled immigrants this is clearly untrue. They may be out of work or on low wages due to globalisation, robotics, austerity, the markets, the dominance of china, the decline of British industry etc, but tying this to immigration is mendacious, dangerous, and entirely without basis in fact.

As robotics continues to take over, and most manual jobs disappear in the coming decades, this explanation of foreigners taking our jobs will become more and more appealing and more and more dangerous.

it does matter if it's an idea under consideration or a plan in action.

their job is to consider options, and they binned this one (thankfully).

normally this sort of transparency would be seen as a good thing, unfortunately with the vehement overreaction of the press to an immature proposal as if it was policy, I suspect in future we won't find out until the ideas are beyond the proposal stage.

if you take a single quote, and ignore everything else they've been saying and doing for the past 6 months, you could indeed say that the UK Government is similar to Trump's administration, but it's simply not an objective assessment.

Theresa May wants to close the UK off to foreigners. It's just her, but as a popular PM she has a lot of domestic power -- more than Trump. She can make laws.

You're right that the old power structures are still intact and if they decide to assert themselves over the Conservative party then Theresa May could be removed (it's not like she was elected into the position to start with).

Where did Ellison immigrate from?

Sorry got that one wrong, his adoptive father was an immigrant, but Ellison was born in the US. Thanks for correcting.

In both cases it's a response to wage-repression that has been going on for decades. Trump simply leveraged the angry response to that to win.

There are many more sensible political responses but they don't come from the establishment, they come from the left wing, and establishment/business interests/the media in the US and the UK is fanatically hostile to the left wing.

Hitler's electoral rise was a similarly a response to wage repression by the Weimar Republic who was similarly fanatically hostile to the German left wing (KPD).

Actually... https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/17/france-creates-a-special-v... #FrenchTech

I only understood bureaucracy after living in France.

This EO was issued yesterday US time and other countries are still studying their moves in relation to this EO but I wouldn't be surprised if some decide to court some of those talents esp Iranians, Iraqis and Syrians.

Aren't they doing this for years now?

London, Berlin, Barcelona are names I always hear when they talk about tech start-ups in Germany.

With the Brexit an this EO, maybe the dream of Berlin to become THE start-up hub of Europe will finally become true.

I know people from the banned countries who got their degree from best in the world PhD groups, who are going to or went to Canada for jobs because of this election.

A surprising number of Iranians get PhDs from Stanford, MIT and CMU. They're exceptionally talented and kind, in my experience.

Syrians too. see MIT CSAIL

For any Americans reading this, how does it feel right now to have Trump as your leader give what he's enacted in the last week?

Horrible. I'm American, but I don't live there.

This stuff makes me worry about family back 'home' - and whether I'll be able to get back out again. Do I risk not seeing my spouse or do I hold out on visiting family? My spouse, who is not American, refuses to go back with me if I do.

Edit: Some things I thought of after I hit send:

I realize this may be unfounded, but things are so... unsure ... right now that I don't trust the government at all. In addition, I'm relying on news and it looks pretty dire. This looks like the sort of policies that American's used to laugh at.

Good. The income of laborers and low-wage workers has been artificially suppressed due to uncontrolled immigration working at rates lower than minimum wage. My hope is that these actions will increase the wages of the lower class, which will increase the velocity of the dollar in America and get our economy going again.

It is sad that many illegal immigrants will be deported, but if we provide a path to citizenship, it sends a message to others thinking about coming illegally that if you come and wait long enough, you'll gain citizenship. That's a dangerous message in my opinion.

"Good. The income of laborers and low-wage workers has been artificially suppressed due to uncontrolled immigration working at rates lower than minimum wage. My hope is that these actions will increase the wages of the lower class, which will increase the velocity of the dollar in America and get our economy going again."

Or, you know, we'll just import whatever it is for 2 cents more instead of paying people to do it. Unless you start to make it artificially expensive to do that through tariffs. In which case, you are essentially trying to prop up the entire economy on a house of cards. Which is what got us into a mess in the first place.

You can't build a sustainable economy on pretending things aren't actually cheap and that people aren't willing to get paid next to nothing to do them.

It's the same thinking that, for example has us building m1 abrams tanks that we toss in the desert, never to be used again, because "these people need jobs", despite the military not actually wanting to build them anymore and desperately trying to get congress to let them cancel it.

In the best case, this kind of silliness lasts until things get automated. In most cases, this kind of silliness lasts a lot shorter time period than that because your economy is not competitive with others who aren't pretending (IE China, et al).

So unless step 2 of this master plan is "somehow completely isolate ourselves from the rest of the world while making tons of money, ..."

You also can't build a sustainable economy by importing everything and expecting everyone to be highly educated. Not everyone is capable of earning a degree, and those in the lower class need to have the potential for a comfortable life.

Edit: to those downvoting me, can you please explain?

hence, the only real hope being basic income and friends, not sticking head in the sand and pretending world has not changed.

You simply aren't going to be able to provide a lower class a comfortable life by giving them work that doesn't actually need doing. Worse, trying probably ends very badly.

Ideally you are right, but instead of arguing about an ideal that will never happen in our two-party political system, I think we should try to think of a solution that will at least somewhat work in this country. At very least, it will work as an economic band-aid until we can change our political system.

> At very least, it will work as an economic band-aid until we can change our political system.

But that's the problem right there: It will not work, and in fact it will make things (possibly much) worse.

But it won't work, and will make things worse.

As for "until the system changes": How do you think the system changes if you try to band aid it? Who is then fighting to change it?

Systems change not generally in smooth realization that things are not going to go well 50 years from now, but instead when things hit the breaking point and the lower class revolts.

See,e.g., the history of the world elsewhere.

Sad, but true.

> the only real hope being basic income and friends

This may the the only real hope. But what about these people until then?

Rather than doling out welfare, it looks like Trump is shifting wealth around by increasing the incentive to hire Americans at the cost of more expensive goods and slightly smaller margins.

It's unorthodox, but is it foolish?

> Or, you know, we'll just import whatever it is for 2 cents more instead of paying people to do it. Unless you start to make it artificially expensive to do that through tariffs. In which case, you are essentially trying to prop up the entire economy on a house of cards. Which is what got us into a mess in the first place.

What about the negative externalities that come when a country no longer has an industry that many others rely on? When it comes to things like quality and having a stable supply chain, those kinds of things can be glossed over when "it's always 2c cheaper from china".

Steel is a good example, the main reason why china is still banned from trading steel on the open market even though it's so much cheaper is their lack of QA and also their government's lack of market reforms which would prevent china from effectively pumping and dumping on the world market.

Or what about food? Sure you can just import 100% of your food and let all the farmers in your country go out of business to the subsidised farmers from other countries because it makes economic sense, but anyone could see the potential dangers that could occur in the long term that would make such a plan more trouble than it would be worth.

No matter what you do, the jobs won’t come back.

Adidas has moved almost all their textile production back to Germany, for example – it’s all automated now, cheaper than in China, and the QA is the best in the world.

There is no way the US can ever compete with that.

Wouldn't it be better for both the environment and local automation industries [0] if we produced goods within the countries that consume them?

Whether or not local manufacturing jobs never come back, I just don't see why you would want to continue with something which seemingly has so many negative externalities (ethical, environmental, as well as a loss of means to innovate).

[0] https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/11/19/industry-matte...

Well, no.

Production in Germany (~30% renewable, ~20% nuclear) or France (~85% nuclear) or Norway (~100% renewable) is far better for the environment than in the US (~3% nuclear and renewable combined).

Additionally, you can’t produce everything in every country – so producing as much as possible at one place and then shipping it out will be better.

Renewable energy in the United States accounted for 13.44 percent of the domestically produced electricity in 2015, and 11.1 percent of total energy generation.

First sentence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United...

Big corporations send manufacturing to countries where it can be done for cheaper due to fewer regulations protecting local environments and sweatshop working conditions (China, etc). They then place the products into shipping containers and burn the lowest-grade fuel we can extract from the ground in order to send it all over the world.

It might be cheaper in the short-term and supported by all of the most progressive corporations but the damage we're doing will affect all of us eventually.

Edit: I'm not saying that globalisation is all bad, but in the war against Trump it seems people are forgetting all of the bad parts...

> You can't build a sustainable economy on pretending things aren't actually cheap and that people aren't willing to get paid next to nothing to do them.

I'll type this until I'm blue in the fingers, but the fundamental issue driving the wedge is that any savings is prevented from actually benefiting consumer prices, due to explicit national policy.

If Walmart comes in with imported goods and cuts prices in half, then people's cost of living should go down. Even though work is leaving, people should actually need to work less to support their same lifestyle.

But as market progress would cause the CPI to decrease, the federal reserve explicitly creates enough new money to compensate and then some. The new money inflates prices precisely where it can be injected into the consumer economy - anything that can be financialized (eg houses, cars, healthcare, education).

The people are correct to be upset about their economic position - they're bearing the downsides of market progress while sharing few of the gains, by policy. Unfortunately their ire is easily misdirected toward other unfortunate victims, to keep this society-scale wealth extraction scheme going.

> The income of laborers and low-wage workers has been artificially suppressed due to uncontrolled immigration working at rates lower than minimum wage.

Source?

Logic. There are 11 million illegal immigrants in a country of about 300 million. Assuming around 7 million of those work & assuming 6 million of those work at or below minimum wage, that means that 2 percent of the population is probably underpaid. That doesn't sound like much until you consider that almost all of that 2 percent is working in some sort of manual labor, whether it's agriculture, construction or housework.

If the logic is so sound, it should not be difficult to prove. So, I'd wait until you prove it via data and get accepted by an independent fora. Until then, this is one of the many plausible theories.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_i...

Tl;Dr - wages for lower class/lower educated minorities are hurt, but employers gain an advantage (lower labor costs). There's also a paper by professor in econ from Cornell about African Americans suffering the most from it, but my phone won't link to the PDF.

Outside of academia you just have to go to your local home depot to see how much cheaper you can get someone to come work for you for the day, or go to any massage shop charging $25 / hour instead of $60+ while employing illegal immigrants.

Thanks.

> while employing illegal immigrants.

It's important to note what the original claim of the parent comment was. It was not "illegal immigrants" but "uncontrolled immigration" which includes both legal AND illegal immigrants.

In regards to legal immigrants there seems to be frequent discussions on HN about H1B visas and their effects.

Here's an article talking about them. http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2015/05/economists-h-1b-vi... (the direct link to the study is in there as well)

Edit: I should clarify - this isn't the only way to immigrate / cover all use cases, etc etc - just that in this & my first comment there does seem to be some wage suppression occurring in some forms related to various immigration.

The parent comment also claims it is "artificial suppression". In fact, even if the H1B effects are said to be true - it seems the issue is not legal immigration but HOW the H1B visas are granted and to whom. This is entirely different than the implication of the parent comment which seems to suggest to halt immigration.

Parent comment also is only referring to low-wage jobs so I suppose the entire H1B thing is irrelevant to the discussion. Not sure what you're looking for... you asked for a source - seems clear that yes, wages for some groups are "artificially suppressed" by "uncontrolled immigration". Is immigration uncontrolled? Yes immigration is not 100% controlled, hence illegal immigrants are a thing. I suppose you could argue that wages are suppressed "naturally" because of uncontrolled immigration if you want to argue about semantics in order to ignore the research that does show wages are suppressed.

> Parent comment also is only referring to low-wage jobs so I suppose the entire H1B thing is irrelevant to the discussion.

I'm not the one who mentioned H1B. I mentioned "legal immigrants".

> Is immigration uncontrolled? Yes immigration is not 100% controlled, hence illegal immigrants are a thing.

I could say the other way too. Immigration is not 100% uncontrolled, so it is controlled. However, what we do have is controlled immigration to a large degree and there are some uncontrolled immigration too. The ratio of controlled to uncontrolled is very high. So, I can not see how one can make the claim that immigration is uncontrolled to being with.

> Not sure what you're looking for... you asked for a source - seems clear that yes, wages for some groups are "artificially suppressed" by "uncontrolled immigration".

There is nothing to say that immigration is uncontrolled. Further, there is nothing to say that legal immigration suppresses (not lowers down) wages "artificially". The words used in the parent comment "uncontrolled", "artificially" and "suppress" have specific meanings which replaced by "illegal", "supply-demand" and "lowers down" change the impression of that statement.

(since I don't post much, not sure why I can't respond to your last comment)

However... what? > I could say the other way too. Immigration is not 100% uncontrolled, so it is controlled. However, what we do have is controlled immigration to a large degree and there are some uncontrolled immigration too. The ratio of controlled to uncontrolled is very high.

In 2015 1,051,031 people obtained lawful permanent residence (https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2015/tab...). Illegal immigrants are estimated at 1,201,000 for 2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_Uni...). Is that really the definition of controlled? The "ratio" you stated is completely inaccurate.

The original person was talking about people working for less than minimum wage (because they are illegal immigrants), so do they suppress wages for those jobs? Yes.

> In 2015 1,051,031 people obtained lawful permanent residence (https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2015/tab...). Illegal immigrants are estimated at 1,201,000 for 2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_Uni...). Is that really the definition of controlled? The "ratio" you stated is completely inaccurate.

You are comparing apples and oranges. Permanent residents (the green card holders as per definition in your link) contain ONLY a subset of legal immigrants.

Apples and oranges? Let's do some math. Refugees in 2015: 69,920. Asylum in 2015: 26,124. That gives you a total of 1,147,075... yes still less then illegal immiration. Adding naturalization (730,259) gives you 1,877,334, except naturalization is irrelevant in this because it includes people born outside of the states to American citizens & includes people that still live outside of the country (think children of military or expats) or people who have been permanent resident (living in the US already) for 3 years. Please do tell me all the other subset of legal immigrants. Maybe you're including the whopping 85,000 H1B visas or other temporary work visas for NON-immigrants?

Feel free to continue to ignoring evidence.

> Maybe you're including the whopping 85,000 H1B visas or other temporary work visas for NON-immigrants?

Are you telling us that at a given point of time there are only 85,000 people in the US with H1B visas? In 2009, there are 650,000 H1B holders : 10 times the actual number [0]. J1 visa holders are about 300,000 per year [1]. Even the most conservative estimates makes this 1M legal residents apart from Green Card holders. Even the most conservative estimates, makes legal residents 2x the times the illegal residents. The actual number will be even higher.

Feel free to continue ignoring the evidence.

[0] http://cis.org/estimating-h1b-population-2-11

[1] https://j1visa.state.gov/basics/facts-and-figures/

No the numbers I listed were entries of each type in 2015. That doesn't include ones from previous years. You said immigration was controlled. The fact that roughly the same amount of legal immigrants came into the country as illegal immigrants in the year 2015 shows this is not accurate.

With your logic we might as well just tally up all the legal immigrants that entered the country and all the people that have been naturalized since the country was founded.

George Jesus Borjas, Harvard Economics prof has thoughts on this: http://cis.org/Borjas

I'm not really an expert in Economics. I tried to read through it but couldn't quite understand the main take away. What exactly is the relevant take away wrt this discussion?

The best empirical research that tries to examine what has actually happened in the U.S. labor market aligns well with economy theory: An increase in the number of workers leads to lower wages. This report focuses on the labor market impact of immigration.

I get what the report focuses on. The report has to be contextualized with two important phrases used in the parent comment "uncontrolled immigration" AND "artificial suppression" of wages.

It's just supply and demand isn't it? If you have a larger supply of workers due to laws around immigration being laxed, does it not stand to reason that the increased competition would lead to lower wages?

Especially when an economy is not at full employment, like the the US.

There are two important points in the comment above : (1) Immigration is "uncontrolled" in the U.S. and (2) Wages are artificially suppressed.

I'd like to see a source on both of those parts. Each and every word chosen in the comment above is critical to the claim being made (artificial and uncontrolled; in particular).

> (1) Immigration is "uncontrolled" in the U.S.

If you are taking uncontrolled in it's most literal definition then you won't find a source, otherwise all you need to do is look at situation in the US with sanctuary cities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_city

As an Australian, I find the whole concept a bit baffling. That a city just decides "If you make it to this city, we will protect you from immigration laws". I don't see how you could describe an immigration system as "under control" if all the rules can be thrown out the window if you get to a "safe zone".

I know this shooting has been referenced alot in the US and i think it's a good example of this, how can immigration be considered under control when a man can be deported 5 times and still get back in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Kathryn_Steinle

> (2) Wages are artificially suppressed.

Well again, like all things in politics definitions are not always a constant. Artificial in this case could describe a host of valid definitions from Any government action on a free economy to overly burdensome regulations and mandates that force a market obviously in one direction. I'm sure some people would argue that taxation itself is wage suppression.

So for this case, I would say when you take the fact the US's labor particpation rate still hasn't recovered to pre-GFC levels http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2016/jun/13/da..., the laxing of immigration laws combined with stagnating wages http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/.

I think you can definitely make an argument that wages have been suppressed by these policies.

(1) A "sanctuary city" does not prove that immigration to the U.S. is uncontrolled. At best, it shows that illegal immigrants are protected.

(2) I'm not looking for political definitions. I'm looking for facts via research and data which show that wages are "artificially" suppressed due to uncontrolled immigration.

So far, I've only seen are plausible theories and hypothesis. Now, I'm waiting for actual data and research to back it up via a credible independent process.

I've lived in Canada my whole life, but I'm also a born U.S. citizen.

I feel hopeful about the outcome of the election. I'm interested to see what can happen with an effective reset of corporate sponsorship in the highest seat of government. The nice side effect of businesses not believing that he could become president, is that they didn't have as much time to buy favours.

The proposed rules for regulatory bodies (one in, two out) could considerably reduce the financial and emotional cost of doing business in the U.S. and perhaps finally undo some long-standing pay-for-play regulations. As it stood, I would have felt terrified and uncertain if I were to start a business in the U.S. one year ago.

I don't think Donald Trump is necessarily any better of a person than the other candidates; but I think he has a better chance of doing good by accident. The alternatives seemed like they were trying to trick the U.S. into paying for their expensive lifestyles in spite of the consequences to the public.

> I'm interested to see what can happen with an effective reset of corporate sponsorship in the highest seat of government.

This isn't that, it is rather the opposite.

If you're thinking that there are more corporate ties to the Trump administration than there would have been to the Clinton administration, I can only encourage you to reconsider. On top of corporate ties, there are even preferential ties to foreign governments.

I'm merely noting that it isn't a reset, no need to insult me.

Fair enough, I've softened the language a bit.

> I'm interested to see what can happen with an effective reset of corporate sponsorship in the highest seat of government

I think that until now it is exactly the contrary you say

> The proposed rules for regulatory bodies (one in, two out) could considerably reduce the financial and emotional cost of doing business in the U.S.

And this is not in favour of the corporate sponsorship, is it?

I suppose outing all the evil environment regulations is very good for corporations and business but how about the actual people?

> I don't think Donald Trump is necessarily any better of a person than the other candidates; but I think he has a better chance of doing good by accident.

You seem to have a very specific definition of good. It only applies to corporations

I don't appreciate that you cropped my quote regarding regulations, but I'll address your statement.

Regulations are actively campaigned for by large businesses to create supply-side pressure (fewer, or no, new companies can meet the basic regulatory requirements of your business, therefore you control more of the market with more certainty).

If you want to talk about effective environmental regulations for people, we could start with strict liability for waste dumping. It took all too much time for Dow Chemical to see any pressure for water contamination scandals, and they still haven't faced much. The other major environmental case I can remember is U.S. EPA versus BMW, but that one is clearly preferential. If it were a U.S. car manufacturer, the penalties would be less dire with near certainty.

As for your last point, I'm sure you see the folly in it. Without getting too far into it, I'd like to point out that I gain nothing from the hegemony of established businesses. There's no reason to imagine that I'm out to make their lives easier.

Secretary of State: Exxon's chairman and CEO

Secretary of the Treasury: Goldman Sachs' CIO

Secretary of Commerce: The "King of Bankruptcy"

Secretary of Labor: CEO of Hardee's

Secretary of Education: From the Amway/Blackwater family

I could go on, but pray tell: What would be the point of buying favours when you are in the position of doling them out?

There is a huge difference between the face of Exxon being secretary of state, and the secretary of state secretly representing Exxon.

It is a lot easier to tell when the CEO of Exxon is being transparently preferential to Exxon, than it is to say for sure that the secretary of state is being opaquely preferential.

And even if he can manage to slip Exxon-preferential policy through without rejection, I would argue that the United States of Exxon is far better for Americans than the United States of Saudi Oil Money. That's what you got with the last Secretary of State.

Funny you should mention the Saudis. They're about the only ones who are still being granted entry visas.

You've been had.

The list of countries which preclude visas for the next 90 days was compiled by the previous Secretary of State.

Sorry, my mistake, I wasn't aware that Trump was required to pay the previous Secretary of State any mind.

He was elected to do better.

I'm impressed when any new president avoids doing worse.

> I could go on, but pray tell: What would be the point of buying favours when you are in the position of doling them out?

I would say that your question is a loaded one, one that assumes the worst of each of the people you listed. That they are all corrupt and would put their own businesses above all else.

A question that I don't see asked often (and when it is the answer isn't very apparent) is who else would be better suited?

Considering the Obama administration was heavily weighted toward academia and political establishment figures, something which Trump campaigned hard against, who else would you pick other than the biggest business leaders?

To those who are modding people down for answering the parent's question, cut it out.

I can't believe all the other responses to this question were either positive or from someone abroad! Perhaps I live in a bubble (Philadelphia), but there is a pretty unified view of how it "feels" right now: embarrassing. Awful. It feels like a bad dream that we're expecting to wake up from. And people are _afraid_ of what's to come from the administration, and of the attitude that the election has seemed to condone. The feeling is so strong here that it reminds me of riding public transit on a snow day -- you can generally make any remark to any random stranger about the snow and instantly relate to one another. That's how it is about Trump. His rhetoric does _not_ reflect the views of the majority of Americans (as the popular vote shows).

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-babB4IwUpD4/UAG8Cf1QXzI/AAAAAAAAAr...

> Perhaps I live in a bubble (Philadelphia), but there is a pretty unified view of how it "feels" right now: embarrassing.

Consider that hillary won the suburbs of Philadelphia stronger than Obama in the last two elections, and yet trump still won the state...

Yes, it is... mysterious. I'd expect the demographic here to be roughly similar to, say, the Ars Technica forums, and yet HN appears to be have many more Trump apologists. I wonder why that is.

Note that the question was asked around 5-8 AM in the continental US on a Saturday morning, so early responses were likely to come from abroad. Like many others here, I'm an American who lives abroad. There are a lot of reasons for this, but part of it was concern about the direction the US has been taking in the last 16 years.

I'm horrified and terrified of what this government holds for the future. It seems like the US is quickly abdicating its role as guarantor of peace (flawed as it was in that role's execution) and I worry deeply about the possibility of a divided and poorly-armed Europe being overrun by Russian influence or the Russian military. In addition, there is a terrible human cost to GOP policies with regards to healthcare, the environment, and of course telling Iraqis who put their lives on the line for the US that they can just go home and get murdered.

I worry that Trump's bluster about voter fraud has less to do with his injured pride at losing the popular vote and more to do with claiming reason to annul any GOP failures in the 2018 or 2020 elections. I can imagine a GOP supreme court, GOP congress, and military with GOP sympathies might be willing to go along with it.

The world's democracies, under both conservative and liberal leadership, have been too willing to infringe on their people's privacy, and I wonder where this goes if you extrapolate the trend over the next decade or two. The closest thing we have to a leader of the free world is Angela Merkel, and she's suffered politically for her policies.

Disturbing, scary and predictable given his campaign rhetoric.

Not american but as an anti-statist, Im enjoying this.

At this point, I just hope he doesn't get us all killed. The guy is obviously deranged, and having him at the helm of the US military is frightening.

For me and many many others I know, it's terrifying and enraging. Also I'm deeply ashamed.

Also wrt HN: like some others I am a bit surprised to see the strong Trump support here, but then, hate is so often over-represented behind the shield of anonymity.

Hacker News represents the American tech community, and the American tech community appears to be moving towards an embrace of right wing and neo-reactionary ideology, which is odd given the anarchist and leftist roots of hacker culture.

The mythology of Trump casts him in the mold of the Silicon Valley archetype of self-made Ubermenschen like Thiel, Bezos or Jobs, who render the state and the status quo obsolete through sheer force of personal will and aggression.

I despise Trump, but in a perverse way, I welcome the damage he will inevitably do. The harder he and his staff of racist oligarchs swing the pendulum of American politics to the right, the more swift and brutal the retribution will be when it swings back, as it must.

He's going to discredit the axioms of the alt-right, disgrace the Republican party and, hopefully, ruin the office of President so much that actual core political reforms take place if for no other reason than to prevent anything like that from happening again.

Why have I waited so long to process my dual citizenship?

Two questions:

1. What is the difference between elected dictatorship and democracy?

2. Will Americans stop screaming 'Murica', 'We are number 1' from now? This president and how elections are held in this country are a joke. So much for democratic process and respect for the office.

1) If I had to guess you are conflating two things when you say democracy. When people say 'democracy' in western countries they are usually referring to a particular form of democracy: liberal representative democracy, or also occasionally refereed to as constitutional democracy. Its quite possible to have illiberal democracies with some contemporary illiberal democracies being Egypt, Russia, Philippines, and increasingly Turkey. Democracy, in either its representative or direct form doesn't guarantee liberal values such as due process, freedom of the press, and formal or informal political oppositions.

A population can keep willing electing a dictator and that dictator could even be popular, but that political system would not be a 'democracy' as you might normally recognise; it will espouse none of the liberal values that places like the UK and the US typically expect.

Democracy is a system of government in which the citizens exercise power directly or elect representatives from among themselves to form a governing body.

If basic human rights aren't guaranteed by the government, citizens may not be able to exercise their power. Other actors may therefore rule and govern.

As such, authoritarian regimes that denies such rights to its citizens can't be called democracies.

>What is the difference between elected dictatorship and democracy?

In countries where elected dictators rule you can vote for anyone you want, as long as its the dictator.

>Will Americans stop screaming 'Murica', 'We are number 1' from now? This president and how elections are held in this country are a joke. So much for democratic process and respect for the office.

This statement only holds water if you'd feel that same way if your preferred candidate won.

>> This statement only holds water if you'd feel that same way if your preferred candidate won.

The fact that a bumbling idiot (apologies for my language)can become the leader of a country, fill the white house with 'swamp' leaders and within ONE WEEK sign so many executive orders and actions:

- without studying the history of why things are the way they are

- without appropriate counsel of stakeholders

- without any repercussions for such actions (no checks and balances provided by democratic systems)

I think my statement holds water regardless of who got elected president.

Obama also signed many executive orders in his first week. He set the precedent.

>> - without studying the history of why things are the way they are

In this case. Studying history about immigration from certain countries?

>> - without appropriate counsel of stakeholders

Who decides what is appropriate?

>> - without any repercussions for such actions (no checks and balances provided by democratic systems)

Chosen for by the US democratic system and exactly done as promised.

The definition of what constitutes a democracy reaches far beyond 'majority rule' and having a voting process. I'm not going to go into detail here as there are multiple easily found primary sources on the subject.

Executive orders are quite limited in their scope although they may be very harmful. They are not laws and can certainly be illegal and hence repelled.

> They are not laws and can certainly be illegal

Turns out, that the specific Immigration Trump order is illegal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/opinion/trumps-immigratio...

Well, but how is it not democratic? Didn't Trump say many times he'd do exactly this, and he won?

Arguably executive orders should not exist, nor should a powerful President. The Swiss system of a rapidly rotating presidency and strong "state rights" seems preferable to me. But the USA has strong elected Presidents and I never saw any American seriously challenge that setup, I hear more talk of states seceding than I see talk of changing the constitution to limit the power of the POTUS.

So I don't see your point. The people were given a (fairly crappy) choice, made it, now their preferences are being implemented. That's democracy.

Don't get me wrong. I think locking people who live in America out of the country because they happened to be on vacation at the time is outrageous, stunningly stupid. But maybe if prior generations of politicians had been more responsive to anti-Muslim sentiment things wouldn't have got so extreme now.

This was not the preference of "the people". It was the preference of the the (narrow) preference of the voters in a handful of states important in the Electoral College process.

Wow... Apparently I shouldn't post before coffee. That second sentence went completely off the rails there.

"Well, but how is it not democratic?"

It's quite simple, it's not democratic in the sense that the majority of the population voted for another candidate, but in the end Trump got elected.

Final ballot count:

Hilary: 65,844,610 votes

Trump: 62,979,636 votes

Now, I understand these are the electoral rules in the USA and I'm not saying Trump won unfairly, but he certainly didn't win democratically since the majority of voters didn't want him there.

That takes you down the road of arguing the USA isn't a democracy, which is a fine semantic argument of little relevance to current events.

If this starts a movement to abolish the electoral college, great, but the core problem here isn't a few million votes. Even with a different system Trump could still have won. The core problem is that such a guy was able to even get close to the White House and the root cause is a dire failure of all the other politicians to address the concerns he addressed.

So you are saying we are running a republic of representative government? And yet these are the rules we play by and have always played by and I disagree this instance and so I need to virtue signal that "muh people's voice bruh."

The Dictator's Handbook is a great book if you're interested in the difference between autocracies and democracies. Also, CGP Grey's 'The Rules for Rulers' video is a good intro if you only have 20 mins -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

2. Will Americans stop screaming 'Murica', 'We are number 1' from now?

The people screaming that before this will mostly be proud of this action.

The number of refugees the US had taken from Syria was already pathetic. Stopping taking any is straight up evil.

The people who actually supported Trump are likely pleased with how things are going. He's doing exactly the sorts of things he said he would do. In the US, the President does have a pretty crazy amount of power, and recent Presidents have all expanded that power, with Congress's and the Supreme Court's assent most of the time. So now we get a President with no respect for the office or anything, which is exactly how he campaigned, and he's going to abuse that power as much as he can. It's truly frightening.

As for democracy, this election actually wasn't an example of it. Millions more voters voted against Trump. The US Presidential election system is obviously broken. It was obviously a ridiculous system before the elections of 2000 and 2016 proved that it was.

Believe me, most Americans agree with you that our elections have become a joke. Congressional districts have been redesigned in the past 10 years to give Republicans a huge unnatural advantage in the House of Representatives. And the US Constitution itself gave us the undemocratic Senate and Electoral College. These things are by design. They were built to be safeguards against democracy run amok. But now the GOP has figured out how to make those safeguards work against the country. It's going to get ugly. It could happen really fast. I'm genuinely scared about the future of the US and the world.

> These things are by design.

And this is why, I'm of the opinion that the design needs to be changed.

> Believe me, most Americans agree with you that our elections have become a joke. Congressional districts have been redesigned in the past 10 years to give Republicans a huge unnatural advantage in the House of Representatives. And the US Constitution itself gave us the undemocratic Senate and Electoral College.

How is the senate undemocratic? Isn't it the same as pretty much every other western democracy? I know it pretty much mirrors what we have in Australia except that we have a lot less states.

The Senate isn't inherently undemocratic, but it's not population-representative. It gives an effective psuedocount of 2 to each state, regardless of its population. For states with very little population (think Wyoming compared to California) it gives them a distinct additional voting strength that is not population proportional representative.

Arguably, the additional representation made more sense before the federal government got as big as it was, and before mass communication and the Internet made large-scale cross-state collaboration and organization feasible.

I don't really see why either of those would be reasons for or against having senatorial pseudocounts. The idea was always based on the density of urban states relative to sparsely populated states. Any large-scale cros-state collaboration would require a large number of small states to have any impact relative to a CA or an NY.

It's not universally or obviously regarded to be true, but I work from the following premise—

difficult and slow communication makes it harder for smaller actors to defend themselves against the tyranny of the majority, as plans get made without proper consultation with representatives of minority interests.

With easy information, however, news travels faster, and more elaborate plans can be worked out in the same time, and hence it is easier to account for minority interests.

> With easy information, however, news travels faster, and more elaborate plans can be worked out in the same time, and hence it is easier to account for minority interests.

I don't see how this at all explains the fundamental ideological differences between states and how less densely populated area's wouldn't be screwed if the system was changed to just be a popular vote or something similar.

Sure I can hear about how people in the middle states are dying because they have no jobs and are using record levels of hard drugs, but that doesn't mean people in the cities have to vote with them in mind.

I don't think that this EO is applied to holders of valid green cards in the US but definitely people on visas like H1B are definitely to be affected but I think that a company of the size of Google could make some arrangements as a quick remedial to situation by transferring some to other countries where they have operations to work from there till they figure out how to handle this situation going forward.

Applies to all aliens, which includes GC holders:

According to NY Daily News: "Within hours of President Trump’s executive order limiting immigration from Muslim countries, green card and visa holders were already being blocked from getting on flights to the U.S."

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/trump-order-blocks-...

I have read the full text of the EO and I couldn't find any reference to this applied to GC holders.

Can you please point me to the paragraph or item in the EO where it mentions this?

I'm pretty sure that entry using a Green Card is an "Immigration Benefit".

Yeah issuing/renewing a GC constitutes an "Immigration Benefit" but denying the entry of a GC holder should not be covered by this EO.

DISCLAIMER: Not a lawyer or even paralegal. Take this opinion of mine with a grain of salt.

The ability to reenter the US without a Visa or entry permit is a benefit of the Green Card. Those benefits have been suspended.

Another benefit of holding a green card: Global taxation on all global income, paid to the USA and enforced globally via FATCA: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/corporations/foreign-account-...

There are numerous permanent residents who pay (or are forced to pay) US taxes on all global income, for the privilege of holding a Green Card and being a permanent resident.

Section 3(c) of the EO says

> I hereby suspend entry into the United States, as immigrants and nonimmigrants, of such persons for 90 days from the date of this order (excluding those foreign nationals traveling on diplomatic visas, North Atlantic Treaty Organization visas, C-2 visas for travel to the United Nations, and G-1, G-2, G-3, and G-4 visas).

Therefore, it excludes everyone from those countries apart from the mentioned exceptions. The exception list does not include a GC holder.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/us/politics/refugee-musli...

"It will bar green card holders," Gillian Christensen, acting Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, said in an email.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-immigration-gree...

I must say that I was stunned to read about these reports as I was thinking that the worst part of this despicable EO was singling out Syrian refugees for an indefinite ban from entering the US followed by the fake concern for the welfare of women and religious minorities in the ME by instructing the AG to publicly shaming wife beaters only of foreign nationals but to deny entry to legal permanent resident who went through all the vetting procedures and hoops is just equally despicable as banning Syrian refugees indefinitely.

People have lives, friends, and family. Not just work.

Yeah true but I was arguing while in the shoes of Google not people affected by this decision.

Google will be fine. This is a humanitarian crisis, not (yet) an economic one.

It is astonishing that people with an already legal card to work in the US and living there are banned from entering the country.

Don't forget the initial executive order was signed by Obama. Banning dual nationals from these countries to use the Visa Waiver Program.

Could you explain in more detail please?

Ref: http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-transportation/201...

I believe the parent was referring to [1], which blocked dual nationals of the aforementioned countries from using the visa waiver program if they were eligible under a different nationality (e.g. a dual UK-Iranian national could not enter using the VWP on their UK passport). However it was an act of congress, not an executive order, though it was supported and signed by the former president.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/15/iranian-amer...

Requiring people to get a visa is rather different from banning people who already have one.

Assuming the executive order holds up, In the best case they will be allowed to reenter the U.S. after 90 days. The executive order suspends immigrant and nonimmigrant entry for only 90 days for people from specific countries not on a Diplomatic, NATO, UN, or International Organization staff visa.

Of course, the 90 days is there to give them time to come up with a more permanent policy, which will as likely as not be worse. If any terror attacks happen in that period, they will turn the screws even harder.

I suspect existing visa/GC holders will be allowed back in quickly once Tillerson is confirmed(better than 90 days). Not that that would mitigate how phenomenally short sighted and stupid the EO was.

This suspension could be renewed very easily and even extended to other countries. There's a report on NYT [0] which fielded questions to Iranian officials and politicians looking for their reaction to this EO and they made it very clear that they won't share any sensitive info about their citizens with the US admin rendering them to be the most likely candidate to be permanently banned from entering the US esp. when taking into account that they top the list of those seven countries in terms of visa holders in 2015.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/world/middleeast/trump-vi...

> This suspension could be renewed very easily and even extended to other countries

Well, it seems that the current execute order is illegal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/opinion/trumps-immigratio...

We should not be banning our Kurdish comrades!

Are there any noises about coming capital controls on foreign remittances? Seems like a logical next step to enforce the lock-out of foreigners and lock-in of assets.

Would this actually be legal?

I think that there are international agreements and treaties that ban such draconian and vindictive measures.

I don't know the legalities of it. But the government hasn't been bothered by legalities in many things for quite some time.

So then the first step just has to be to withdraw from those treaties (or abrogate them if they are feeling spunky).

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