Comment by neither_color | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neither_color | Hacker News Reader

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It's not unique to the US at all. Almost all the countries in North and South America are like this. If you want to claim it's wrong that's another debate but everyone in the Americas came from somewhere else, borders are an ephemeral concept and what's bizarre to me is how strict Europe is with jus sanguinis when its borders have changed so many times in the last century and in the centuries leading up to it. I do believe in border controls and vetting immigrants in the sense of "how many people can fit on this life raft without sinking it, what is the max take-off weight of this airplane" but really everyone I know, even on the right, at some level feel there's an inherent unfairness to where you happen to spawn in this life.

Speaking of bizarre, why are there zero barriers for a Finnish person to move to Portugal, but major barriers for a Brazilian, culturally more proximate due Portuguese colonialism to do the same? Why are there zero barriers for a Greek or Estonian to live and work in Spain but tough immigration rules for the spawn of their 15+ latin american colonies, who speak the same language and have the same religion?

Modern states are to a large part insurance providers. Citizens pay premiums and get health care, pensions, disability care etc.

Insurance works when a large group of people pay premiums to protect against some condition that has not happened yet. If you could sign up for a fire insurance once your house is burning, the system would collapse.

For similar reasons, modern states need to keep poor people out since, on average, they will be a large net burden on their welfare systems.

I think what curbs the immigration to Spain is its economic situation(15% unemployment rate), plus I wouldn't say that Spain has tough immigration rules. In 2020 11% of of people living in Spain were foreign nationals: https://www.ine.es/prensa/cp_e2020_p.pdf

Out of these 11% only a third were from EU (including Great Britain), 6.5% of the foreign nationals were from Latin America, taking 5 out of the 15 countries from which most Immigrants come from, and the biggest year to year increase in immigration is from Venezuela (39.8%), Colombia (31.3%) and Honduras (29.4%).

Note that in Spain most immigration comes from Latin America, and they can get the citizenship after only two years, so they disappear from the immigration statistics quite soon.

> what's bizarre to me is how strict Europe is with jus sanguinis

Asian countries are also notoriously hard to get citizenship in.

> Why are there zero barriers for a Greek or Estonian to live and work in Spain but tough immigration rules for the spawn of their 15+ latin american colonies, who speak the same language and have the same religion?

Could be worth exploring for Spain and Portugal.

There's a "transitive property" issue, however. It'd be hard to do this without, effectively, adding the former Spanish and Portuguese empires to the EU.

This would also run into the Monroe Doctrine, if you carried it far enough.

But it is an interesting idea.

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