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Comment by alfromspace | Hacker News Reader

There's a tricky game being played. For instance, everyone is "against open borders", but they're for decriminalizing border crossing, against deporting anyone, and want free healthcare, housing, and education for everyone irrespective of legal presence. Then people cook up these theories about various forms of law enforcement supposedly promoting crime and disease by making people fearful of taking preventative actions, and we're expected to consider these arguments in isolation and believe you when you say "no one is arguing for" the thing every word you say argues for.

Maybe you two should try arguing in good faith.

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You asked for, and I supplied, a citation about trust in healthcare. What is bad faith about that?

I don't know what any of the other border stuff or law enforcement theories your talking about has to do with trust in the healthcare system, but feel free to continue making noise about it.

No one has said that open borders and no prisons prevents diseases.

Why don't you tell us what your positions on those topics are? I'm trying to look below the surface here.

I didn't see the citation when you first posted. I don't doubt it's valid, but the issue I had up the comment thread was with the theory that lowered faith in medical institutions is because of anti-vaxxers and fear of incarceration and deportation. Your source says nothing of the sort.

I don't know what effect the fear of incarceration and deportation have in regards to lowering faith in medical institutions.

I don't know if the folk who are against vaccination are the sole cause of eroding trust in healthcare, but given that healthcare trust is eroding and anti-vaccination believers are rising, it's not much of a stretch to think the two might be related.

What I do know is that according to the study I linked, trust in healthcare has fallen quite a bit and that is likely to hinder our ability to slow an outbreak.

I called you out for bad faith, not because of your position on the topic, but because I have re-read this thread over and over and still cannot find anyone making the argument that opening borders and opening prisons is going to prevent diseases.

You and others (top-level comment spawning this subthread) seem to be implying (correctly, I think) that immigrants are afraid to engage with the medical establishment (or police... they're all lumped together under "authorities") because they're worried about getting caught up in the immigration enforcement dragnet.

The obvious solution to distrust and lack of engagement between immigrant communities and the authorities — unless you have another non-obvious one — is to stop enforcing immigration laws at all. In other words, the government should never check someone's citizenship/immigration status, except maybe when someone's caught committing a crime (maybe... at least if it's a serious crime... then we'll check immigration status and send them back if they're not a permanent resident). That's what set Al on tilt, because it is essentially an open borders policy.

I have very specifically gone out of my way in this thread to not convey any opinion, implied or otherwise, regarding immigration or border policy. I only wanted to give a source for the fact that trust in healthcare is falling.

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