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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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> And most of these families not only don’t speak English, they often don’t even speak Spanish. They often speak a variety of indigenous languages common across rural Latin America.

That actually sounds super fascinating and like a unique opportunity to learn about pre-Coloumbian history. Do you know any of the language names? Did these children come from extremely remote villages that never adopted Spanish?

> If that suddenly happened at Spring Hill I guarantee you Trump would win Virginia in a landslide. Democrats like my parents—who are upset that the mixed income neighborhood where we live has some poor kids—would be chanting “build that wall.”

It's honestly really sad that anyone would see these children as a threat and not as an opportunity to learn more about the world and our history.

Parents want what’s best for their own kids. A large population of impoverished non-English speaking refugees takes massive amounts of attention and resources from the school to cater to. That takes away attention and resources from the kids who are already there.

Also, studies confirm that kids are highly influenced by their peers. Rich Americans are highly skeptical of what values and behaviors their kids will pick up from poor people. In my country this is so well accepted that we don’t even bother to hide it. But I think rich Americans basically act consistent with that premise even if it’s taboo to say it out loud. It’s an important part of why people move to exclusive suburbs.

> A large population of impoverished non-English speaking refugees takes massive amounts of attention and resources from the school to cater to.

They also add value. As you can see by the very interesting reply about indigenous languages, there is significant cultural and historical value being dismissed by viewing non-English speaking poor people as a pure liability.

You can learn about that in a book without having to divert budget resources to hire expensive teachers with the skills to meet those kids’ needs.

The value I'm talking about isn't educational value (although there is that too), it's cultural and social value. There's vast sums of money wasted on things far more malignant than supporting multiple languages for students.

Whose money? What obligation do these communities have to support those educational expenses? And of course the change in culture and they’re kids’ socialization isn’t something you can fix with money.

can you describe the cultural and social value and why or why not you think other countries like Israel, India, or Japan would benefit from having South American mestizo and indigenous peoples?

There are many extant indigeneous groups across Central and South America who still retain the use of their traditional languages, often alongside Spanish. Around Mexico/Guatemala these are often Mayan languages such as Tzotzil in the Mexican state of Chiapas, but other language famailies include the Choco languages (such as the languages of the Embera and Wounaan people, most of whom live in the Darién region of Panama). In South America you have groups like the Mapuche with their own languages, and in the Amazon alone there are over 3,000 recognised indigenous territories.

In many of the Caribbean regions of those countries (particularly Central America), Spanish might not be spoken at all, with most people instead speaking an English creole alongside an indigenous language such as Garifuna (e.g., see https://en.m.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Caribbean_Nicaragua ).

Then you get into the Caribbean where some islands speak Dutch or French (or creoles thereof), and of course Brazilians speak Portuguese rather than Spanish (though there is some mutual intelligibility there).

Also, it's worth stressing that in many of these areas, knowledge of a language does not mean the ability to read or write it.

Lol I just went down a rabbit hole about language. Idk which he is talking about but there are a few million people who speak Mayan languages in Guatemala still.

The same might be true about the south part of Mexico, like around Oaxaca, I'd fact check though before believing me.

> That actually sounds super fascinating and like a unique opportunity to learn about pre-Coloumbian history.

Not a lot. Most native people who did not adopt colonist languages have very little idea about their own history stretching any further than 100 years or so. This is because they mostly had no writing. Without writing, it is insanely hard to preserve anything more than living memory.

It depends on their upbringing. If they come from backgrounds with broken families and normalized violence they will generally be a threat to children that don't come from that background

That claim is extremely suspect, are there any studies?

Do you have any experience working with children that come from those backgrounds?

There's a reason poor urban schools are so terrible

It's definitely not the neglect and underfunding of course

Do you have experience working with them?

Yes I taught middle school in Baltimore for a few years. The level of normalized violence is significantly higher than the middle class suburban school I went to.

Yes it's caused by parental neglect and poverty. Many poor urban schools are the highest funded but even then need significantly more resources than an affluent suburban school

Note that: (1) anywhere in Baltimore is far richer than the Bangladeshi village where my dad grew up; and (2) his village is nonetheless vastly safer and more peaceful.

What plagues Baltimore isn’t just poverty. (We lived there for a couple of years.) It’s a breakdown of the social hierarchy, and in particular the replacement of male authority with gangs.

You may want to recall that correlation doesn't equal causation. We live in an incredibly complex system where things may appear a bit disconnected.

Bleeding heart people are always like this. They want to help...but from very very far away.

Well, Derek Thompson at the Atlantic isn't one of them. He seems to feel that the resettlement payment should be large enough so the refugees can live in the fancy neighborhood. It's the unwashed Americans who can't move there.

This is a huge distortion of Derek Thompson's views. He has written extensively about what he calls an agenda of abundance. His solution to housing unaffordability is not to increase payments to either migrants or citizens. His solution is to tear down the restrictions that prevent substantive housing from being built. In this way, housing prices will be lowered for everyone.

Exactly. These are the same people that have the "in this house <insert progressive proxy>" next to signs opposing new developments in their neighborhood

I respect the people who actually volunteer. I also can respect when people are honest about the limitations of their own compassion. However, both are costly (the first in terms of time and second in terms of social cost). Claiming to care for others, while doing nothing for them, is the most selfish approach.

It's (frankly) the difference between Democrats from 20 years ago versus today. Policy disagreements aside, I believed the rank and file Democrat legitimately wanted to help and cared about the poor. It's now become a wasteland of grifting and virtue signaling. People are up in arms about Trump and the populous revolution on the right, but damn it if the left doesn't need one and badly.

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