Don't forget, if you're against immigration and guest worker policies that just so happen to increase margins for corporations you're xenophobic!
We all need to pitch in if HN is to have a chance of meeting its goal to be a home for intellectual curiosity.
It just means you think that people from other countries
are less deserving of job opportunities than people from
your country.
It's very fashionable to virtue signal that you have no loyalty to your country and that we should all live under a one world government.
I do not share that wish. I love that we do not have a mono-culture of government in the world, but have 195 different decentralized experiments happening on how to best run the world. I would hate to have a single experiment running with nowhere to look to or flee to, if it all goes awry.
But I live in one of those 195 experiments, and my fellows that share that with me, my countrymen, I support above the other 194. That's called being human.
Of course I don't deny personally valuing my family and friends more than strangers, but that doesn't mean I think they fundamentally are more deserving of jobs than strangers. I would personally help a friend get a job before I would help a stranger, but I still think that Americans are no more deserving of jobs than non-Americans, and I don't believe that is a contradiction.
Edit: I also don't think we should be under a one-world government, and I don't see how that follows.
I am fairly convinced that economic protectionism is bad for economic growth, particularly in the long run. And even if I'm a direct beneficiary of a certain protectionist policy, I'd like to think I will oppose it, because it's essentially equivalent to the government taking resources from a non-protected job sector and giving them to the protected job sector.
Nice try, but nationalism is not an intrinsic trait of being a human.
This sort of tactical nihilism is honestly pretty confusing to me. Borders, whether national, ideological, social, tribal, linguistic, etc. always have some level of arbitrariness to them, and yet they still represent useful categories. The house door that you lock every evening is merely a collection of arbitrary atoms arranged to separate what you imagine to be your property from others. In the framework of nations, the idea of treating citizens differently from non-citizens as being "discrimination" is an odd one. A country belongs to its people; it doesn't belong to those across the arbitrary border. We all make (sometimes arbitrary) restrictions on access to that which we value; humans who don't do that usually end up losing them to those who do.
That has always been my aversion to nationalism, because to me it occupies the second group in trying not only create loyalty, but much like the company, try to usurp natural loyalty. The power of which I've seen a family member go into nationalism's deep end and strain our relationship with them because I didn't agree.
What's the point of even having a country if citizens aren't prioritized over non-citizens? What's the point of banding together as a nation if you don't engage in policy that helps one another? I don't feel just as entitled to a job in Japan as a Japanese citizen. Do you advocate for one world government or something?
For jobs? We're talking about welcoming immigrants into the country to work. My opinion doesn't extend to every possible way that a nation can prioritize its own citizens. If, for instance, there's an American citizen involved in some incident in another country (plane crash, terrorist attack, unjust arrest, etc.), of course I expect the USA to prioritize that. I also expect the USA to prioritize its own economy, infrastructure, education, etc. (although I think that is for the benefit of all legal residents, not just "citizens").
Are you aware that there are negatives to this, or just that they're not important to you?
What I think you mean is that you can be against increased margins for corporations, and that's the reason that you're against immigration.
It's a strange strange thing to be against increased margins for corporations, without any other explanation, so I can see why many people would be confused, if that's what you're trying to say.
Immigration can lead to less competition and therefore innovation. Instead of people from other countries creating services that compete, they get absorbed by multinationals.
Is it? I know a lot of leftists who consider corporate profit margins something to intrinsically oppose. I mean, they're concerned about the consequences of those margins, but they do think the consequences are inescapable - they think rising corporate margins inherently make the world a worse place.
And yeah, that's historically driven an anti-immigration streak among labor movements, made stronger when it's not about new citizens but people operating under alternate labor laws. The deBoer type leftists of today don't carry that xenophobia, but some of them definitely still complain about H1B as a corporate subsidy.
It's not a position I endorse (if anything, I'd argue for "strengthen the bargaining position of H1B workers"), but I don't think it's terribly uncommon. I agree that the comment framing is inflammatory and unnecessary, but I wasn't surprised by the part about margins.
See: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/95-engineers-i...
The faux intellectual vibe in programming is purely cultural due to class associations. If welders and prgorammers traded places in terms of class associations (ie, if welders earn what programmers earn and vice versa AND if welding was something you do in an office and programming was something you do in the field or workshop), well guess what? Welding would have an academic intellectual culture, and programming would have more of a blue collar culture. You'd hear complaints about welding interviews requiring memorization of chemical reaction formulas instead of practical skills. Programmers would probably long ago been unionized. Etc.
A couple generations from now, basic programming skill will no longer be so scarce that even an idiot who manages to pick some up is highly valuable. The reason programming ability is scarce is not because it's much harder, but simply historical/cultural.
the only reason i'm posting is that i finally completed the transition from programmer to welder and i find my new peers generally smarter and harder working. fwiw
(I agree american investment in education is abyssmal, and I bet gp might agree too, but mistook your comment's meaning)
starting from nothing it took about 6 months practice and general skill building to where i could work on projects and not screw them up for everyone. one nice thing about this world is that if you aren't so good, you can still pull in minimum wage if you work hard. once you get the hang of things you can build up a client base and start charging more. and if you have any kind of flair for design you can start selling bespoke pieces instead of just being a pair of hands.
after about $60/hr it gets a lot tougher. you don't really qualify for the really high-end work (i.e stainless pharmaceutical). and no insurance.
I went back to tech for .. 4 years because of the pay difference and because of insurance for me and my wife, but I'm back in the shop now because..i think my software mindset is pretty radically different than the way things are done now.
trade work is a constant challenge, and you can see your skills grow over time. faster, cleaner, more reliable, more clever. if you have a little* financial flexility and love hard work, i strongly recommend it as a second career. if i'm lucky in a software shop i get to solve a problem a day, in the metal shop i solve tens or hundreds.
[oh, sorry, should make this clear - if you start in welding/machining you can certainly make quite a decent living, have benfits, etc - i'm just talking about coming in later in life being self taught and trying to carve out a little work here and there]
It's naive. Good intentions, but naive.
There's a lot of talk about STEM, when as far as I can tell, the money is all in computers; the others might get you slightly above median salaries, but if they are above median, it's not by much.
If you compare your average non-computer industry STEM job to something in Medicine, law or business... I think that STEM, outside of the computer industry, just doesn't pay that well, and it's kind of disingenuous to advertise it as a path to financial well being to young people who are so poor that they have to look at education as a monetary investment.