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Comment by iambateman | Hacker News Reader

I love this article, because we have to remind people that Americans have been afraid of Italians and Germans and Swedes and Jews and the Japanese and Muslims and the Chinese and DEFINITELY the Irish at one time or another.

Established groups feared new groups. But in the end, these people generally brought new innovations and economic growth and interesting new foods.

They mashed new cultures with old - not without pain - and eventually gave us General Tso's Chicken.

In other words, it's gonna be alright.

^^ this is what I tell people who support Muslim bans. I'm not sure if it helps them, but it helps me.

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I don't know how well it works on Trump supporters, but there's something that bugs me about this argument. It seems to take a moral issue (do you treat other people well?), and replace it with an economic issue (do you know of inventions, food, or some economic benefit from those people?). I feel like it's a racing certainty that many Italian-Americans lived ordinary lives, and didn't do anything out of the ordinary—it's a quality shared by the vast majority of all people regardless of their origins. Shouldn't that be okay too? Otherwise, how important would someone have to be? Can we use binary search to find out?

If one can't successfully appeal to someone's sense of morality (perhaps because they have different morals), one can try to appeal to their sense of self interest.

This one, uh, I point-blank refuse to believe. The moral principles about how you can treat other people are so widespread and uniform (made it into the bloody bible, even; the only bit that everybody knows from that MLK speech is about this), that you're gonna have some serious convincing to do, before I believe that people "have different morals". It seems more believable that people have just the same morals they always did, but are applying them very selectively without proper justification (as it always is with prejudice).

And in getting them to apply morality in a more uniform matter, sometimes it's easier to address morality by way of self-interest than morality directly. Getting someone to acknowledge than a random Iranian being allowed in the country will not cause buildings to falls is a good thing, and whether it's achieved by appealing to their morality or their self-interest it's still a good thing.

People's answers to things like the trolly problem says we do have different morals and the way you frame a question has a lot to do with what we think is moral.

What are the proper justifications for treating other people as less than people?

Believe what you want, different people believe in some fundamentally different things. Go hang out on Breitbart, and see if you still feel the way you do.

By the way, I think you're right. The moral argument is stronger than the economic one. And among another crowd, I would probably lead with moral.

That said, there is no need to only have one argument, they can both stand together.

As best I can tell, we have no moral obligation to let every person into the United States, but we have an economically-sound reason for accepting a steady stream of new folks.

Really thoughtful comment though, thanks.

> In other words, it's gonna be alright.

In the long run, sure. But in the short run, were there Irish gangs, German mafia &c.? Were those forms of criminality different from the forms prevalent amonst ethnic-English Americans of the same time period? I honestly don't know.

What sort of social upheaval and strife occurred along the way to assimilation? In the long run, things might be okay, but how much pain will there be along the way?

Stop fearmongering and implying immigrants are naturally criminals.

Criminality us a result of being marginalized from society and not being able to work "honest" livings. You are forced to rely on your own group, pushed to the edges and fighting for its own.

Maybe a better question to ask is why those groups have not been afraid of others at any point? If true, what makes Italians, Germans, Swedes, Jews, Japanese, Muslims, Chinese and the Irish not engage in bigotry and hatred of others. Come to think of it isn't that a sizable segment of the world population? And if so maybe the remaining segment(s) need to be identified better.

At least half of the groups you listed are well known as not exactly being tolerant to others, even today. Put in historical perspective and pretty much all of them were part of the world that "engage in bigotry and hatred of others".

Follow this through, and you find that racism is inherent in culture. The dominant culture uses race in order to oppress and scapegoat the minority culture, pretty much everywhere.

This doesn't make it okay, of course. This means we need to be that much more conscious of it, and take active steps to mitigate the effects of racism. (This is the distinction between "I'm not a racist" and anti-racism, btw)

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