Hacker News Reader

Comment by ethbr1 | Hacker News Reader

As a proponent, I'd say it's founded in the basis that the United States is literally a nation of immigrants.

Native Americans are ~3% of the current US population.

It's hard to muster up conviction that US citizens are any more deserving of US opportunity than anyone else willing to work for it.

View on HN

That’s a retcon ginned up in the 20th century to assimilate Irish and Italian immigrants. The US was established by colonizers and settlers and enslaved people, not immigrants. Colonizers and settlers displace an existing population and create a new society in that place. In 1790, over 90% of the white American population was British ancestry. My wife’s family, which populated Oregon in the 1800s, were settlers, not immigrants. My family, which came to Virginia in the 1980s, are immigrants. It’s an important distinction.

Much of the immigration of the 1800s was similarly settlement, as German and Northern European immigrants pushed west along with British settlers and established their own communities there. Mass immigration in the modern sense, such as Italian immigration to existing communities, happened long after the nation was established.

> It’s an important distinction.

Is it? New York City grew from 60,000-ish to 3 million from 1800 to 1900 - did a person from Europe that move to New York city in 1816 or 1876 immigrate or settle? They were not getting 40 acre land grants!

That’s a fair point. New Amsterdam is a good example of a place that has long been a “city of immigrants.” But I’d submit that it’s not representative of America, and is in fact the opposite of the America Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about.

I think he'd disagree with you. In fact, he does, explicitly, and specifically about New York! But, serious question: who gives a shit about the America Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about?

In a footnote to Chapter 9 of “Democracy in America”—addressing what maintains Republican government in America—de Tocqueville writes about Philadelphia and New York:

“Also in [their] midst is found a multitude of Europeans pushed daily by misfortune and loose behavior to the shores of the New World; these men bring to the United States our worst vices, and they have none of the interests that could combat the inﬂuence of those vices. Inhabiting the country without being citizens, they are ready to take advantage of all the passions that agitate the country; consequently we have for some time seen serious riots break out in Philadelphia and New York. Such disorders are unknown in the rest of the country, which is not worried about them, because until now the city population has not exercised any power or any inﬂuence on the rural population. I regard the large size of certain American cities and above all the nature of their inhabitants, however, as a genuine danger that threatens the future of the democratic republics of the New World, and I am not afraid to predict that it is there that they will perish[.]”

The America that de Tocqueville wrote about is America. At least, it’s the America that’s special and worthy of emulation. It’s a democratic America, where free, independent citizens engage in collective self-governance.

New York City is the antithesis of that—a place where elites leverage ethnic conflict to garner votes, to control a population that mostly doesn’t have the tools or traditions necessary for self-government.

In 1831, the year of Tocqueville's visit, Nat Turner's rebellion took place in rural America, a part of what would eventually became the deadliest conflict in the republic's history and the closest it came to perishing.

It has contrived to survive Tammany Hall and Gritty (so far).

You gotta pump the brakes on on the de Tocqueville worship buddy, I love the guy but he didn't unlock the secret of America, pastoralism was a fad at the time and he was as guilty of it as many others. (That said, do listen to these excellent radio shows about his time in America! https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/tocqueville-s-america-revisit... )

> New York City is .. a place where elites leverage ethnic conflict to garner votes

This is sort of an hilarious assertion at this moment in time.. I mean, elites didn't pick Eric Adams to be mayor of NYC.. they think he is a buffoon!

And every wave of settlement we got was unwelcome, resisted, and discriminated against by the incumbent residents. It's you making the special pleading argument here, that Czechs, Italians, and Irish people deserve to be here, but the Guatemalans don't.

> The US was established by colonizers and settlers and enslaved people, not immigrants.

Let’s hope we get immigrants and not colonizers or settlers then

That seems like an interesting distinction between settling and immigration.

I was of the impression that one could not settle land that was already populated.

Remind me again, how did it work out for the Native Americans who let outsiders come in large numbers?

>It's hard to muster up conviction that US citizens are any more deserving of US opportunity than anyone else willing to work for it.

This is what a lifetime of globalization and capitalist propaganda does to a brain. In societies where the poison has not fully taken hold, people care about their fellow citizens' well-being being more than that of non-citizens. If a fellow citizens struggles to compete in the job market, they don't think "Job Unit #123123213 should just work harder if he doesn't want to be replaced".

People are humans first and citizens second.

All humans deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Obviously the US can't take in the world's entire immigrant population, but IMHO because of its history it has a moral imperative to accept a large number of immigrants.

And if it should come to pass that anti-immigration talking points come true, and immigrants do indeed 'take our jobs', then that needs to be addressed at a structural level (tax, education, welfare policy) rather than the border.

Are Americans allowed to choose which kind of immigrants they want? I know those on the left think merit-based immigration is "condescending" (Pelosi's exact words), but can we at least not pretend all immigrants come from immigrantland?

I feel like I'm the rare type of person who is both very pro immigration but also very anti- endless low skill immigration.

I take my cues from LKY, I guess:

http://thekansascitian.blogspot.com/2013/02/dont-take-fruit-...

I kinda wonder whether the chicken or the egg came first. All Anglo countries have a strong individualist streak. Did America cultivate that individualism to the degree that now they can't see a nation as being anything more than a collection of unrelated individuals? Or did wave after wave of immigration--resulting in a society where people had less and less in common--produce/reinforce that mindset?

the latter. But what does individualism really mean? We don't believe in strong free speech, religious, or other rights even though it is in the Constitution. The individual "rights" that are strongly enforced tend to benefit The Party of course. The ones that do not attract FBI interest. The US empire is quite authoritarian.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com