Kansas welcomed my immigrant parents. Then I built Dropbox | Hacker News Reader

Kansas welcomed my immigrant parents. Then I built Dropbox

kansascity.com

59 pointsingve29 comments

Most people didn't get it yet.

The average Joe from working class doesn't think immigrants are incapable - probably the opposite. His problem is that they may take his job and his life will not improve because one of them built a Dropbox.

And this ties into a problem that Eric Weinstein is trying to bring attention to that the whole of society importing talent/allowing them to tap into the network and stability should be getting a dividend from that talent's produce, along with the misunderstanding that it's technology and automation taking jobs away. The main part of the solution is UBI - or as Andrew Yang calls it, a Freedom Dividend - citizens as shareholders.

How exactly does UBI work when you remove the upper boundary of recipients via immigration?

Can you explain in more detail what you mean?

If you have a UBI, everyone with a lower quality of life will attempt to gain entry to your country to receive the entitlement, and there are only so many resources to go around.

You can’t have strong entitlements and liberal immigration policy.

Legal citizens will get it, not anyone who shows up.

California would like a word…

Downvoted, but California legislated (Immigrant Worker Protection Act) to penalize employers who report illegal immigrants to ICE while providing healthcare benefits to non citizens.

More egregious was how California handled Prop 187 in 1994, which effectively banned the state from providing taxpayer-funded services to illegal aliens. [0]

Long story short: the amendment passed, was challenged in court, the state decided not to defend it, and that resulted in the amendment being overturned in the courts. Illegal aliens today have incredibly broad access to taxpayer-funded services in California.

It's frustrating. People are constantly saying the people of California deserve the current social situation—because they "voted for it"—but the truth is they voted against it and were simply overruled and betrayed by their own Government. If the government is unresponsive to the will of the people, what, exactly are the people supposed to do (short of an armed rebellion)? What they've actually done is move to other states…

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_California_Proposition_18...

Exactly.

The problem is more deeply rooted in the human condition namely fear and envy.

Yes, the average Joe doesn’t want an immigrant taking his job but mainly the average Joe doesn’t want to feel as if he’s below average.

“People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.”

-James Baldwin

What if the fear is real though - fear of survival - how is that a problem in itself? With Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - if base needs are met the envy-jealousy-anger will turn into inspiration, as one example.

To copy/paste what my other reply said:

That’s a rather simplistic view.

For one, your base needs might be food and shelter but within Average Joe’s social circle his base needs may be...

- Ford F-150

- Cable TV

- Time for hobbies

- NASCAR tickets

UBI doesn’t solve for people’s need to be superior.

Solution: Cap executive pay and return more shareholder value/wealth to employees. You’re not going to achieve equality but you can make sure that more wealth is returned to society while preserving their need for superiority.

“The bottom 80% of Americans own 8% of stock market wealth and the bottom half own essentially zero.” - Andrew Yang

UBI will help curb early suffering that leads to most people's minds and hearts not being open, where they find unhealthy coping mechanisms to feel better - such as the need to feel superior because they have low to no self-esteem (internal vs. external). Otherwise there is a path to healing old trauma to undo such ego mind coping mechanisms.

If he has to deal with someone sending him files via Dropbox, his life will definitely not improve.

My personal (unsubstantiated) theory is that people don't vote with their economic interests. They vote with their social interests (is the narrative that this candidate selling cause my relative social position to rise or decline?)

This can explain why affluent urban professionals, whose economic and social position is relatively secure might vote for liberal economic and social policies. They live in a world where their marriage is more likely to be stable, their opinion is more likely to be taken seriously, and their values are more likely to be validated by movies/TV/media. More immigration is not going to diminish his/her relative position in society. It might even make it higher as a lot of these immigrants aspire to be in that professionals' position.

On the other hand, it can also explain why some working class white and Hispanic voters might vote for candidates/policies that sell a narrative of traditional values (anti abortion, church + family in place of a gov't social safety net, etc). They live in a world where their families are less likely to be stable, and where their values are increasingly looked down upon in movies/tv/media. Greater immigration might diminish their relative position in society (even if it makes them slightly richer .... ). There might even be greater competition for admission for their children into T25 schools (which are lately seen as gatekeepers into the "affluent urban professional" class).

Greater immigration has a direct impact on non-skilled labor, especially illegal immigration when your competitor pays people under the table.

This is especially true with the manufacturing class, which has watched foreign factories whittle and carve away at them for two decades.

I think the people who voted this way were definitely thinking of their economic position and not social position.

An article about precisely this: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/08/tennessee-valley-authorit...

He’s joined America’s rich, and America’s rich will live like the global rich.

This column doesn’t answer the basic fear that open borders means America’s middle and lower classes will tend toward the global middle and lower classes.

Rich in China is awesome. Middle class in China looks like Appalachia. That’s the global middle class, not American suburbs.

Such a perfect synopsis of the situation in so few words.

This is the issue with all "skill based immigration" -- you want to bring in the best from other countries. Once there are are too many of these guys, the average Joe feels like an idiot and ends up servicing these guys (Uber, food delivery etc.) Millions of Joes' will then vote for a guy like Trump

How do you reconcile the inherent selection bias of immigration with the fact our domestic population may not be able to compete? Until these questions are properly answered I’m not sure if there’s a solution.

“Able to compete” is a funny phrase. My father works in a labor field. I think he has to pay something like $7 an hour in insurance apart from an hourly salary. His field is full of undocumented workers whose employers don’t pay this insurance (it’s all cash).

When undocumented laborers are hurt or injured, local hospitals pay for medical care for undocumented individuals. So they don’t really need insurance anyway.

In that way my father can’t really compete with foreign labor. How we reconcile with this is a good question.

> Even now, the outgoing Trump administration is seeking to dismantle the visa system for international students, and making it far harder to hire skilled workers.

One important rhetorical element in writing/speaking persuasively is the ability to articulate the “other side” of a debate and address its point. In this article the “other side” is simply xenophobic allegations of the current administration.

I’m happy for the author’s success, but not convinced at all he’s done any research as to why these reforms are needed.

The H1 visa system needs a lot of work. It is not a system that works as intended. Being a positive and welcoming place to immigrants is not the same as flooding the market with warm bodies to undercut local labor.

> not a system that works as intended [..] flooding the market with warm bodies to undercut local labor.

Are you sure that's not intended?

"Not enough migrants arriving to keep pay down - [Irish] Central Bank" - https://www.independent.ie/business/jobs/not-enough-migrants...

America is changing. It used to be a place where excellence was welcomed because people knew that if your neighbors succeed, so do you.

Now, there's just infighting, racism, hatred and disdain for anything scientific and skilled. The average Joe wants a huge house, imported cars, hot spouse (or the millennial equivalent of such keeping up with the Joneses) but cannot accept that others who have worked harder, smarter and plainly got lucky can do better, especially immigrants.

Not blaming the average Joe but our society is increasingly turning third world with one blaming and fighting another instead of celebrating everyone's successes.Theres a term for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

There's no point in celebrating the success of tech founders if the wealth that they create doesn't spread into the community.

But it does spread into the community. Go take a look at your 401k. The alternative to not excelling technologically is ceding the lead to other countries and letting wealth creation of the future happen elsewhere.

As a though experiment, would you rather have top tech companies start and expand here in the US or would you rather prefer they happen in China or SE Asia? Because those guys aren't stopping when we are infighting.

> America is changing. It used to be a place where excellence was welcomed because people knew that if your neighbors succeed, so do you.

What? It's so funny how "news" is able to spin a fairy tale that the masses so readily believe. Ignoring the fact that we exterminated our "neighbors" ( natives ) and stole their land, enslaved blacks, etc, america was never a "welcoming" place.

Almost every ethnic, racial group was banned from immigrating to the US at one point. Heck, all of asia was barred from immigrating to the US for most of the 20th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924

Not to mention millions of mexican-americans who were deported to mexico.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Repatriation

> Now, there's just infighting, racism, hatred and

It's always been that way really.

> disdain for anything scientific and skilled.

Nah.

> The average Joe wants a huge house, imported cars, hot spouse (or the millennial equivalent of such keeping up with the Joneses) but cannot accept that others who have worked harder, smarter and plainly got lucky can do better, especially immigrants.

You've described humanity everywhere, not just america.

> Not blaming the average Joe

Really? Because it seemed like you were blaming them. Oh yeah, you did in the paragraph right above this one.

Yup. My mistake. I should have said that there have always been people who hated immigrants. Today, they have a loud voice and use statistics from a hundred years ago to justify their actions.

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