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Comment by dillondoyle | Hacker News Reader

Which would also massively help with our population growth and funding entitlements problem.

We celebrate quickly giving citizenship to pro bball players (Enes Freedom, who btw I think he's awesome and congrats). But it's inaccessible for so many that would be net contributors to our country!

I firmly believe it's rooted in racism & the electoral benefits of Republicans rather than an actual policy/economic debate.

Doesn't help when one political party and their news media empire catastrophize and fear monger dangerous, gun toting, drug muling, cartel infested, caravans of chain migration invasions every October on the dot. But perhaps now I'm the one politicking ;)

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Expanding an underclass of poor migrant workers does not help anyone. How would population growth help us when we also supposedly have a housing shortage in almost every city? Of course we should try to get elite athletes and academics to come to America, but the picture is much less clear for other types of immigration.

The sum is greater than parts

So can we let skilled tradesmen immigrate then?

Your thinking goes against the entire history of the US. The goal of having immigrants is that they will come to work and improve their and everyone else's lives, not that they will come rich to support the country.

we already have a large pool of migrant workers and it seems like there isn't enough.

right now there is a lack of this 'underclass' labor for farms and other intense, low pay industries. they can't function with covid restrictions on that non-U.S. citizen migrant labor pool. So they aren't stealing jobs they doing jobs that otherwise go unfilled [1]

your comment also just writes off an entire class of people and their contributions. America is built on the skill & labor of the 'underclass' and historically there has been movement up the economic ladder.

This article and top comment points out that this economic improvement is currently lopsided against low income workers who are producing the net productivity gain for the owners/corps.

Housing shortage doesn't have anything to do with immigration. But that's a separate and worthy policy change to discuss as well.

There is a lot of research that shows current undocumented immigrants are a net benefit to the US purely economically speaking. Plenty of sources here [2]. I'm agreeing with parent comment in it would also solve our population growth & entitlement problems.

another interesting point in this artificial distinction between skill and unskilled: there is a talk on HN of tech corporations exploiting the high skilled tech migrants which you seem to advocate for.

using the really harsh immigration laws - for instance can't legally be unemployed or between jobs - to get lower than market price labor at the expense of US citizens on this board. Not as bad as holding passports but it is effective

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/business/economy/foreign-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_imm...

> Housing shortage doesn't have anything to do with immigration.

It does if immigrants want to live in housing. (And I say that as someone who is overall quite pro-immigration.)

Housing demand is highly location significant and immigration for the relevant jobs are in areas of the country where there is a demand shortage. So little in this context.

Unless you are retired or a recepient of passive income chances are that if housing in an area is very cheap, you won't be able to afford it. That is the reason prices got so low is a lack of either income generation or demand from those well enough off (vacation homes do not need to be within commuting 'distance-factored-as-time').

Strongly disagree. Especially in tech, many of our success stories are from people who themselves are first generation Americans with parents that arrived here with literally nothing.

American poet Emma Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus,” which now hangs in bronze in the Statue of Liberty’s base. The end of the sonnet goes:

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

America remains competitive by keeping the door open.

If we slam the door shut, we could be missing out on the next Steve Jobs.

>“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

We already have millions of tired, poor and huddled masses. Drive down the street in San Fran, LA, Philidelphia or virtually any other big city in America and you'll see their tents on the sidewalks. The idea that its somehow a good idea, let alone necessary, to import millions of poor, unskilled foreign laborers while we have millions of poor Americans already here is wrong and offensive. The somewhat widespread idea that opposing immigration is racist rather than a show of support for the millions of poor Americans we are allowing to languish is similarly offensive.

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