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Comment by webwielder2 | Hacker News Reader

Why do we need to protect our borders? Why not just let people live wherever they can afford?

People illegally present in the US cannot work legally. That means they work under the table and are subject to all sorts of abuse, and their presence promotes gray market/black market economies.

While I think it is unfair to deport people who have been here for decades and giving them amnesty (again, like we did in the 1980s) is a reasonable solution especially for those who were kids when they came here, I don’t have any problem with stopping new people from crossing illegally.

If we want to increase immigration we should do it the right way by raising legal quotas and allowing people to come via the visa process.

So let people have work permits as long as they don't commit serious crimes and the illegal work problem goes away. There is no necessity for the control freakery that has driven much immigration policy in recent years.

Two of the big problems right now are:

1. People entering the country outside of defined points of entry. We can't issue a work permit to people we don't know are here. Anduril's products are meant to address these gaps in the border, which should lead to all traffic being forced to official points of entry.

2. Illegals who commit crimes get released.[1] Sometimes released domestically, sometimes deported. Some of the deported ones return. Which brings us back to #1.

[1]https://www.foxnews.com/us/kate-steinle-jose-inez-garcia-zar...

1. people don't have an incentive to avoid ports of entry if we don't make the admissions process so draconian.

2. 'illegal' isn't a noun. These are people we're talking about. This is not a place for you to peddle your propaganda.

Agreed on your first point. The process absolutely needs reform.

To your second. It's a truncation of the term "illegal alien": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(law)

That's not propaganda, it's a legal term. Casting commonly accepted terms of the relevant lexicon in a political light only reveals your own political bias.

Recasting legal terminology into dehumanizing nouns is a propaganda technique. It's very obvious that you're here to grind an axe and your axe is a style I'm very familiar with.

That’s open borders and it isn’t a popular policy with the country, which is why it hasn’t happened. (I don’t think any first world country has such a policy, the USA is hardly alone here)

People are worried that a dramatic rise in immigrants willing to work for less (since it’s still better off than their home countries) would undercut their jobs by affecting the supply/demand relationship of the labor market.

I’m not sure unrestricted immigration could work but I think we could increase the numbers of visas we do give out by some number less than unlimited.

Name one country with better-than-average standard of living that has opened its borders and thrived. There will always be a wall around something nice — either around your house, or your neighborhood, or your country.

The United States itself had "open borders" for a long period of time. There was mass immigration from Ireland, Italy, and many other places and it worked out quite well for us.

Even today, we have "open borders" within the US. People are free to move from from poor (or poorly run) communities to places with more opportunities and it's a win-win.

Similarly Europe has 26 countries in the Shengen area. Some of the countries have a "better-than-average standard of living" and they're doing just fine.

> The United States itself had "open borders" for a long period of time. There was mass immigration from Ireland, Italy, and many other places and it worked out quite well for us.

There was no welfare state back then, and the economic situation was vastly different. Also saying it went "quite well" looks over all of the ethnic tension that took decades to fix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Americans#Discrimination

> Similarly Europe has 26 countries in the Shengen area. Some of the countries have a "better-than-average standard of living" and they're doing just fine.

Heard about Brexit? The Romanians are coming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb1AkaKJL08

> Heard about Brexit?

The UK was never in the Schengen Area to begin with.

Do you live in Europe? Schengen is only about passport control at the border, but any EU citizen had the right to work in the UK, no visa required. Eastern European workers lowering wages and quality of work for most British tradesmen and low skilled workers is probably the main reason for Brexit.

At a time when there was infinite demand for unskilled labor and when relative standard of living was much lower.

Canada takes in a large number of immigrants and thrives for it. Based https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra..., we take in double what the US does.

LOL! Canada does not have even close to open borders. They have refugees and they have merit immigration which has been decried as racist in the US. Merit immigration needs a better ambassador than Trump. Perhaps Bernie Sanders.

This is completely unresponsive to the comment you’re replying to. Canada is extremely far from having open borders, controls temporary and permanent immigration vigorously and doesn’t border any poor countries anywhere with substance populations.

Because they impose externalities on the people around them.

And yet immigrants have lower levels of criminality than native-born Americans, so you're actually better off with more of them.

Social safety nets, open borders, future ongoing existence of an orderly nation. Pick two.

This. Things are not good everywhere in the world right now, we have to make trade offs. Humanity will progress and eventually things will be much much fairer, where we could have all of these things simultaneously, but we've got a long way to go as a species.

To add further, it would be horrible if inequality were perpetuated forever. But we have made a lot of progress by instituting liberal order and Western values in our own demarcated nations. This order is uplifting the world and other nations are able to copy it at their own pace. To eliminate the demarcations threatens a race to the bottom wherein the system has to accept people who do not know how to participate in our way of life, in greater numbers than it can accept.

If you think open borders and ongoing orderly nationare an option you're wrong.

Whoever walks into your nation will shape it. Your children's voices don't matter. There are far more children outside the country than in it and democracy can't work with open borders.

I think for most any given policy you could find some constellation of trade-offs and counterbalances that would make it work. Maybe for a certain value of "work" because in many cases those trade-offs would have to violate values or principles that we consider more important.

I think that a nation could in theory have open borders and prosper, but the trade-offs would have to be such that only like-minded people who can fit in and succeed would have an incentive to immigrate. This means that their children's voices would be saying the same thing as your children's, but there would be e.g. no help for the poor since that would attract enough free riders to kill the goose.

So I agree with you that borders are preferable, but I don't think getting rid of them is totally impossible, but I do think that doing so would be even worse for the compassion that makes people want to in the first place.

>I think that a nation could in theory have open borders and prosper, but the trade-offs would have to be such that only like-minded people who can fit in and succeed would have an incentive to immigrate.

You have no control over who comes in when you build a system that requires like minded people.

It makes it just as easy for people completely against those like minds to come in, in any number, and vote with equal voice.

If you have a successful nation/economy, people will want to come whether like minded or not.

>This means that their children's voices would be saying the same thing as your children's, but there would be e.g. no help for the poor since that would attract enough free riders to kill the goose.

The Cartels would take over the the southern united states in a hurry. It would turn the "border" into a series of criminal empires even beyond what exists now. Asian and other gangs would experience massive surges as they import members from overseas.

Insane policies that have no connection to reality and assume there are no bad people.

>no help for the poor since that would attract enough free riders to kill the goose.

while I agree that you cannot incentivize "free riders", I don't think your system is viable with open borders either way.

You will be conquered and you will have no national unity because everyone will bring with them their own ideals and concepts, regardless of your belief that only people who agree with you will come.

And it will be a massive betrayal of your citizens to give away their future to anyone who walks in, all in a massive self sabotaging effort of malignant empathy.

seems a bit offtopic flamewar

I read a research finding somewhere that there are about 500million ppl who would move to US in very near future if they are allowed to move to USA.

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