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Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

Stop misrepresenting the point. Careful what you conflate. We do not have a "climate of anti-immigration".

The issue is ILLEGAL immigration. Musk is a legal immigrant. Trump's wife is a legal immigrant. My wife is a legal immigrant.

Few are actually opposed to legal immigration. Most either are legal immigrants, or descended therefrom just a few generations back. Yes there's a few marginal idiots, but they're ... marginal.

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No, there's definitely a climate of anti-immigration. There's been plenty of actions recently to make it harder for people to legally immigrate, like increased RFE's and H1b denials, suspension of green card issuance and a rumoured plan to stop OPT for F-1 students. Ask yourself this: do you think the climate supports increasing or decreasing the level of migration? Imo the legal/illegal immigration distinction is meaningless because you can _change_ what is legal or illegal. Someone who is "against illegal immigration but for legal immigration" could hold any belief from "we should have zero family-based migration" to open borders.

The mess that is h1b and eb3 for indian educated immigrants working in highly paid white collar jobs tells me that usa is not open for immigration.

What else do you call a 70 year waiting line for green card? Forget citizenship, people do not even get to enjoy the rights associated with permanent residency.

>What else do you call a 70 year waiting line for green card?

We call it fairly distributing the limited number of green cards so that non-Indian immigrants like myself can get a chance to come here too. :)

I don't think it's fair to award opportunities to a person not on their own merit, but based on their nationality. I don't think it's fair to strive for equal number of Icelandic nationals and Indian nationals. It is not fair, but the very definition of unfair.

Language would be better. The monolingual nature of the USA has long been a huge economic and cultural advantage.

So instead of an equal number of Icelandic nationals and Indian nationals, we could strive for an equal number of people speaking Icelandic, Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, and so on. Those with excellent-quality English don't face the limit.

Many people are opposed to expanding legal immigration. From what I understand it's currently quite hard to get into the U.S. legally.

The current climate we are in wants reduced legal immigration as well. Easy examples (and I don't even follow immigration news) are

1) Wanting to not allow immigrants to sponsor their parents anymore 2) Not issuing green cards to reduce the spread of corona virus. You know what actually reduces spread of corona virus? wearing masks, which Trump isn't in support of.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2020/04/23/new-t...

Right...So what do you call Trump want trying to prevent immigrants to sponsor their parents to the US? Meaning if your wife wants wants to take care of her parents in the USA, she cannot? Is that appealing for immigrants?

What do you call the Trump administration literally stopping the issuing of green cards because it "helps contain the spread of COVID-19".

You really think limiting the legal immigration process is not full blown anti-immigration?

Yes, it is not. Every nation has reason to limit immigration for assorted reason - not to be confused with being “anti immigration”.

Disease, crime, and simple assimilation capacity limits how many we can/should take in.

You added a point not exactly accurate. The problem also are people who bend the rules and immigrate to this country not in line with our laws - like Trump's wife - because they are privileged.

Illegal immigration of all kinds is the issue - including immigration under false pretenses.

Trumps wife is literally an illegal immigrant. She broke work visa laws and wasn’t punished because she was white and wealthy.

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