Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

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The divide over immigration isn't over immigrants -- but illegal immigrants. Huge difference. The "anti-immigrant" meme is inaccurate. It's "anti-illegal immigrant."

If someone were to refuse to pay taxes the Left would be livid; if someone refuses to respect the legal immigration process, the Left calls for amnesty.

My wife is a naturalized citizen from Mexico -- it's insulting when people call for amnesty for illegal immigrants while US consulates all over the world have lines around the block for people to apply for immigrant visas.

When we have military veterans that can't get decent care at the VA; I feel a huge resentment at a single dollar supporting illegal immigrants in any way.

Refugees are quite another story: refugees commonly aren't illegally entering the country, but have gone through the proper processes.

The Left supports the so-called "path to citizenship" only because the majority of illegal immigrants would vote Democrat if given the chance. Case in point: note the silence at the Obama administration changing the wet-foot-dry-foot policy for Cubans. Cubans historically vote Republican, so that policy shift illicited not a single protest from so-called "pro-immigrant" groups. A women with a felony convictions and a deportation order resulted in protesters blocking roads. Janet Reno deported Elian Gonzales back to Cuba and the Left supported that. Yet the complete opposite logic is used to support the admission of unaccompanied minors who arrive from Central American countries.

The Democrat support for illegal immigration is nothing but playing to a particular constituency that they need in order to have any hope of winning elections. Cynical? You bet. Look at Lyndon Johnson's comments about black people as an example of that disingenuous "compassion" in action.

You use HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's an abuse of this site and we ban accounts that do it (irrespective of their politics).

HN is for gratifying intellectual curiosity, not for smiting enemies. Enemy-smiting will take over if we let it, so we have to draw a line, and the line we've arrived at is this: occasional political commentary is ok, using the site primarily for that purpose is not.

If you find that HN gratifies your intellectual curiosity about a range of things and you'd like to engage with the community about those things, great! That is the intended use of the site. If you don't find that, or if you're too interested in your causes to care about anything else, then HN is not the internet forum you need. Either way, please adjust your use of this place so we can preserve it for what it's for.

Yet the Trump administration's first action on immigration was to curb legal immigration. And if you bring up H1B on this site or others you will find loads of people who hate the program.

I don't think the claim that the right only wants to curb illegal immigration stands up to scrutiny.

The H1B program should be extremely disliked, it's a fraud.

The radical majority of the program goes to generate corporate welfare for India tech firms. It has been covered extensively on HN, because it's not even remotely coming close to serving the purpose it was set up for (or supposedly set up for).

There are several other ways to operate the system that would fairly distribute H1B visas. The approach we use now, is more than being abused and it's unfair to the millions of people that would like to come to the US from dozens of nations.

>The divide over immigration isn't over immigrants -- but illegal immigrants. Huge difference. The "anti-immigrant" meme is inaccurate. It's "anti-illegal immigrant."

And yet this pic is at the top of the /r/The_Donald right now. Trump voters are afraid that America will become Mexico. But they're also afraid that America will become Syria or Afghanistan or Sweden or Germany.

https://i.redd.it/m9nbyi856moy.jpg

If you don't see the problems that Islamic fundamentalism is causing in Sweden and Germany, you are willfully ignorant. The way Islam is practiced in most of the world is incompatible with western democracy. It's anti-woman, anti-gay, and anti-human rights in general. And each successive generation tends to assimilate LESS rather than more. Yet the left and so-called feminists celebrate this fundamentalist religion for political expediency.

> If you don't see the problems that Islamic fundamentalism is causing in Sweden and Germany, you are willfully ignorant. The way Islam is practiced in most of the world is incompatible with western democracy. It's anti-woman, anti-gay, and anti-human rights in general.

There are a few thousand Islamic fundamentalists in all of Germany and the problems they cause are pretty small-scale. The way most Muslims practice their faith here is rather not-in-your-face. E.g. I recently asked a friend of mine whether he wanted to get a hot dog, when he told me he doesn't eat pork. I had no idea. So then we got falafel instead.

A few thousand in all of Germany? Do you mean to say that 33% of them gathered in Cologne over New Year's?

Why do you assume that those were fundamentalists as opposed to simple criminals?

I actually didn't even voice my opinion on Islamic fundamentalism. Just refuting that this is only about illegal immigrants, it's not. Your comment is just further proof of that.

I don't sense fear from that cartoon - it seems to me a humorously effective lampoon of the wide-left stances of infantilizing so-called marginalized people, and the strange denial of the fact that some adherents to Islam have openly called for the death of the West while attacking it.

I know that the politically correct thing to do is dismiss any such lampooning as a phobia, but that can't be strictly correct even from a PC POV since ideologies don't get privileged treatment that I know of.

"The Left supports the so-called "path to citizenship" only because the..."

I had no idea why I support human rights until you explained it to me, just now. Gratitude.

"The Left supports the so-called 'path to citizenship' only because the majority of illegal immigrants would vote Democrat if given the chance."

Thanks for poisoning the well.

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