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Comment by nip180 | Hacker News Reader

It’s worth saying Boise Aries is a top 5 city in the Americas by population, and has a long history of being very immigrant friendly.

I wonder if there was some tax evasion happening...

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> Boise Aries is a top 5 city in the Americas

Not to be confused with the far less populous and less famously immigrant-friendly Boise.

On a more serious note, I'm curious what connection you see between immigration and tax evasion. Is Buenos Aires known for certain kinds of immigration?

I'm guessing you haven't actually been to Boise?

It has a huge immigrant population. Lots of Latinos, but also folks from all over Asia and Europe to work at Micron. It also has an ever-growing number of Californian expats.

Yes, I wasn't presuming otherwise, which is why I specified "less famously immigrant-friendly" instead of "less immigrant-friendly." I simply haven't heard as much about the immigration there even though I'm American, probably because Buenos Aires is a much larger city.

EDIT: Also, in case my "on a more serious note" didn't make it explicitly clear, that entire sentence about Boise was a joke.

EDIT 2: I might as well add that I looked this up [1], and Boise ranks 175th in immigration as a percentage of the metropolitan population or 101st as a percentage of cities, just among metropolitan areas (MSAs) or cities in the US. That's not exactly a "huge immigrant population" by my account.

[1] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/us-...

I understood you were joking. And, as with any forum of smart, nerdy people, there is an inevitable percentage who will point out how some part of your joke does not fit with observable facts.

I've spent a fair bit of time in Boise, as I have family there. The truth is more complicated than a word. The "city" is friendly in terms of favorable policies; the people who live there aren't uniformly friendly to immigrants. In the late 90s, my cousin was upset that his high school banned (iirc) jackboots and cuffed jeans, until he learned that the style he'd unwittingly adopted was equivalent to skinhead gang colors; the ban was a result of actual skinheads popularizing the style. Then, last June, the literal nazis marching downtown. Granted, it's much worse in Coeur D'Alene.

What happened in Coeur D'Alene?

Former home of an Aryan Nations compound.

Boise ranks #4 on "Percentage of population that's white"

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

I'm a non-white non-immigrant in the US. They're not mutually exclusive. That's why I edited my sibling comment to include a source listing that Boise is also very low on the percentage of immigrants in the population, both in the city and metro area (MSA).

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/us-...

Well, yes, but it's doubtful that "immigrant friendly" results in that kind of demographics (89% white). I understand it's a correlation, but...

Does immigration to South America is still a thing at all? For people besides Latinos.

South American countries seem to have had so many false starts. The moment they have a few decades good run, and it seem the country is finally starting to take off they either have a revolution, putsch, junta, or a communist government.

I don't think you should get downvoted, it's a good question. I live in Buenos Aires, and there is definitely a general perception that the country is hopeless. But for some reason we do get a fair share of immigrants from more prosperous countries such as South Korea and China. There's also a lot of people coming in from Africa, mainly Senegal from what I've heard.

China still has huge wealth disparity. So, while China might seem overall more prosperous than Argentina, Chinese emigrants are often from parts of the country with a standard of living below Argentina's.

Yeah. Even with massive infrastructure investment you still hear stories like children climbing 800m on vines to go to school.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2016/05/27/europe/china-children-edu...

And there are other reasons to move too, like air quality, a pressure cooker educational system, extremely high housing cost as a multiple of salary...

Sure, but there's plenty of starving people in Argentina as well, not all the country is as wealthy as Buenos Aires. So the question is, why do they come here instead of going to a bigger chinese city? My guess is that they already have a support network here. That's why many of them end up working in the same businesses, such as running small supermarkets.

What do you think on Buenos Aires vs Sao Paulo?

I've never been to Sao Paulo, but it has a reputation for being very violent and controlled by gangs. Buenos Aires is actually pretty safe (at least the city itself, the suburbs are worse, but still nowhere near the number of murders that Sao Paulo had at its worst).

Uruguay and Chile have been surprisingly solid for a few decades (not withstanding Chile's recent riots, which are resulting a new constitution). Argentina can usefully be thought of as a country with first world commerce and third world government. Southern Argentina though is more reliable.

*Buenos Aires

No Idaho involved ;)

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