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Comment by MomoXenosaga | Hacker News Reader

Works both ways. Indians don't have a right to migrate to America or Europe.

I think the term "right" is misleading — all rights are granted by governments, none are natural things which would exist without governments (no matter how much my inner anarchist wishes otherwise), government can create the right for others to enter as easily as the right to vote or the right to a fair trial, and that means American and European national governments can if they wished create a right for Indians in general to do just that.

They haven't, but they could.

I mean if we're going to base the rights of humans off of what their respective countries say their citizens have, then with equal strength a country can declare that it has the right to keep its citizens in its own territory.

Yup, that's a fair criticism. Also feels kinda sorta true, given origin countries can revoke passports? But I'm not confident about how any of that works in practice.

Part of why I think the term "rights" is unhelpful, it comes with moral associations that makes people (me included) feel unclean when peering behind the metaphorical curtain and examining how such things function in practice.

Does an Indian individual have a right to be treated equally as Icelandic individual, with respect to us immigration system? Because the system is unfairly discriminating against Indian citizens.

How could these lotteries be made more fair to those born in the most populous countries?

From what I have witnessed, it could be made more fair by simply punishing fraud by taking away the number of applications a company can apply for, and by issuing 10 year bans to candidates found to be lying. There is so much lying about credentials and job experience in these situations.

That will reduce the amount of fraudulent applications, making way for more honest (and higher quality) applicants.

It isn’t unfairly discriminating. The quotas are based on population.

And naturally there are going to be a higher number of immigrants from countries that have a bigger disparity in quality of life, career prospects, etc.

They used to call it "God's Green Earth". Did you check with God about whether anybody had the right to tell people where they could live on it?

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