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Comment by catmanjan | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately you don't just need empty space for people to live, just ask Australians who are effectively limited to the coast or the east.

England is lucky in that what little land it has is good for humans to live in.

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Of course, yes. I suspect that as transit, farming and energy technology improves over the next century or two, we'll find a lot more of that space livable.

You've clearly never been to southern Nevada or the Bible Belt.

Australia is beside USA and Taiwan a good example that suspicion about immigration is not just an irrational fear.

Australian here. Can you clarify what is meant by this?

I think he's talking about how mismanagement of Sydney's growth has resulted in awful traffic and sky high housing market. But I'm probably being optimistic.

Colonists from England, China, and elsewhere devastated the cultures of Australian, American, and Taiwanese aboriginal peoples in prior centuries.

Very true - but I don't think invasion is the same as peaceful immigration.

The English settlement of the eastern united states was perfectly peaceful. Englishmen are not murderous psychopaths, but immigration inevitably destroys the previous way of life, and most groups (such as aboriginal Taiwanese, American Indians, and Americans today) value their way of life quite a lot thank you very much.

You need to revisit your American history. Colonizers massacred natives through infectious disease (sometimes deliberately, usually not), direct conflict, slaughter of the buffalo they depended on for food, forced relocation to useless land, and other violent tactics. Any natives who were in the way of westward expansion were neutralized, one way or another.

Colonizers destroyed the way of life of those who lived through a deliberate program of "civilization" (reeducation) which included sending native children to boarding schools to be raised in American culture and "rescued" from their own.

Indian removal [0] is a decent place to start reading.

This was not cultural change via the melting pot, this was genocide and reeducation as state policy, with a generous helping of biological warfare.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_removal

I think he's talking about the way Australia hides economic problems through immigration.

How is Taiwan a good example for that?

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