Hacker News Reader

Comment by morgante | Hacker News Reader

Nobody is saying that "border restrictions" are fascist.

It's jeopardizing rule of law which reeks of fascism. This weekend, the rule of law was jeopardized though the:

- surprise invalidation and revocation of visas; people who had followed every law were still being detained and deported

- detention of permanent residents

- refusal to follow court orders

We could instigate far more stringent border restrictions (maybe no new visas to anywhere) and I wouldn't call it fascist. It's the implementation (without warning or judicial oversight) which is fascist. We're supposed to have 3 branches of government, not a dictator.

View on HN

The majority of the reactions I have seen focus almost exclusively on the restrictions themselves rather than the way they were implemented.

Among SV, the media, Hollywood, and elites in general, any call for immigration / entry restrictions almost immediately results in the usual "you are a bigot", "you are a fascist" "we are a nation of immigrants" etc. visceral reactions NOT the kind of more nuanced response you provided above. That's the point of the article to which I referred. Maybe it's time to stop calling people names and organizing against them for having completely legitimate concerns and instead debate the actual issues at hand in a reasonable manner.

> The majority of the reactions I have seen focus almost exclusively on the restrictions themselves rather than the way they were implemented.

That's because the problem is with the restrictions themselves. Banning people, en masse, including existing lawful visa holders and permanent residents is a huge problem.

The fact that you haven't seen this information or reaction before says more about you than the facts of the case. If you follow the NYT, Atlantic, or even the Twitter feeds of many people reacting to this (including from YC) you'll see that much of the consternation is about how broad this ban is—not with the specific idea of tightening immigration rules.

In a democracy, we don't ban thousands of people from our country overnight. Changes like this, regardless of their merits, should be debated and approved by the legislature—not made by executive fiat.

> The fact that you haven't seen this information or reaction before says more about you than the facts of the case.

And there we have it.

A large part is that Trump isn't as smooth as a traditional politician. He gets in and starts going for it–no conciliatory tones, no concessions. I bet that if Bush had implemented the same policy, there'd be opposition but not anything near what we have now.

> Trump entered office with one of the three narrowest mandates of the past century, along with Nixon in 1968 and George W. Bush in 2000... Both Nixon and Bush, however — although they’d later become polarizing presidents — adopted conciliatory tones during their transitions into office. Hardly a partisan word can be found in Nixon’s 1969 inaugural address or Bush’s in 2001. They began their presidencies as relatively popular presidents, therefore.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-doing-what-he-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com