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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

> Newly arriving immigrants frequently lack the education to be easily absorbed into a highly skilled workforce

I think this is overblown and repeated gospel.

People in factories are trained to work the tools and machines they work. What's the barrier for an immigrant besides language?

Shop clerk? Farm worker? Baker? Cleaner? Butcher? Driver? I have an infinite list of jobs that do not require much education and even a longer one of jobs that require it, but only on the resume.

Also, are you assuming immigrants at home don't study, nobody of them is a mechanic or electrician or plumber or carpenter?

Let's be honest: immigrants aren't less educated for western societies. It's us who have went through 20 years of studies to center forms in a web page or work as secretaries or scrum masters or bank clerks.

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> Shop clerk? Farm worker? Baker? Cleaner? Butcher? Driver?

Math, low skilled immigrants often lacks basic education and can't properly read numbers. That makes them unfit even for most jobs we nowaday call "unskilled" like shop clerk etc. There are billions of such people in the world and when they immigrate there isn't much you can do to get them a job.

There is a reason why most unskilled jobs today require high school, because without basic math you can't do much at all. Immigrants with high school equivalent education or higher can integrate just fine, immigrants with lower level than that are hard to deal with so most countries refuse to take them in but those are the majority of people in low income countries.

In Sweden they are trying to teach these immigrants math etc, but it is hard since they both needs to learn a new language and math and all those standard things as an adult. And after that they have to compete with "unskilled" locals who learned those things as kids.

> In Sweden they are trying to teach these immigrants math etc, but it is hard since they both needs to learn a new language and math and all those standard things as an adult. And after that they have to compete with "unskilled" locals who learned those things as kids.

Some immigrants to Sweden have such different cultural traditions that they even find it difficult to interpret signs and (western) images. They have difficulties learning how to tell time on a clock.

"- The students don't even have the tradition of reading signs. Don't look at symbols, image interpretation is very difficult, numbers and learning the clock is very complicated, says Johanna Karlman, SFI teacher in Borlänge."

(Note: The immigration to Borlänge is mostly from Somalia.)

Source: Sweden Public Service Radio P1, https://sverigesradio-se.translate.goog/artikel/5293678?_x_t...

As a slight counterpoint to this, there is a lot of implicit knowledge and group cohesion in most workplaces that immigrants can have a very hard time picking up on and integrating into. When I moved to another country I thought I fit in well with my coworkers, but it turned out that my style of conflict resolution was absolutely incompatible with theirs, and I had to relearn how to communicate with my boss, despite the boss being fluent in English. This cultural misfit set me up to be manipulated into the position of group enemy by one of the more socially savvy and manipulative coworkers.

More generally, the challenges in communication are a well known barrier to outsourcing knowledge work.

It's also just false based off of the numbers. In the US at least immigrants are more likely to open businesses and less likely to commit crimes. Immigrants are just as likely to have bachelors or post grad degrees than non immigrants, and are more likely to get associates degrees. Children of immigrants are more likely to get degrees than the average population. Immigration is a net positive economically speaking for developed countries.

Those are vetted immigrants. Vetted immigration is positive for the country, unvetted immigration tends to not be.

Edit: And the "less likely to commit crimes" part is a large part due to USA having such a high crime rate to start with. Last time I looked unvetted immigrants to Sweden and USA had roughly the same crime rate, but in USA that reduced the crime rate and in Sweden it massively increased it. So even if everything else is the same "immigrants increase crime" can be true in one country and false in another just due to the original crime levels being different.

I don’t think Sweden prioritized highly skilled/educated immigrants like the US did. I wouldn’t be surprised if even the “vetted” ones there have fairly high crime rates.

Tends not to be, yet the Americas and even today's Europe prove the contrary.

> Immigrants are just as likely to have bachelors or post grad degrees than non immigrants, and are more likely to get associates degrees.

Can you even legally immigrate into the US unless you at least a have bachelors degree (with some exceptions)?

If all western countries only accept educated people. Well.. it’s not going to end well for any of the host countries if migration rates increase significantly.

My statement included legal and illegal immigrants.

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