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Comment by punkbit | Hacker News Reader

People can’t simply decide to move to the US, Australia and UK and spend the rest of their lives there.

The same applies to South Korea. You want to live there, you need to apply for a visa like everyone else.

Yeah, his point is that he isn't going to do it with those restrictions. Most of these startup visas have all these restrictions. And everyone is always like "yeah, you need to play by the rules like everyone else" and shit like that, but in the end it's just people saying "I'm not buying what you're offering" and then the government just sits there not having achieved whatever objective it set out to do with this stuff.

It's an asymmetric relationship. The nomad doesn't care if SK runs this program. But SK does care if people don't come.

> It's an asymmetric relationship. The nomad doesn't care if SK runs this program. But SK does care if people don't come.

Unfortunately, they don't particularly care. The whole driver behind this program is optics. Both to domestic voters "Look at how global and modern the current government is and how much we're doing", as well as to international headline-readers "Look at how progressive Korea is".

Ah, I see. In that case, I suppose no one really cares where it goes. S Korea's loss, in my opinion. They're the ones whose population will shrink by half every half-century from now.

> They're the ones whose population will shrink by half every half-century from now.

How is that a loss?

I think people are realising that the 'grow your way to success' model doesn't work for countries any more, unless you're the US, which is in a fairly unique position simply due to having a geography that no other country shares.

The immediate problems are likely to be that they will lose the ability to sustain welfare for their non-productive population (the elderly, children, disabled, etc.). The long-term problems are likely to be that they will fail to protect their borders eventually since they can't field a sufficiently large fighting force.

But perhaps they have another path. I guess it's good to have someone else run that experiment. We can observe and duplicate or avoid.

>We can observe and duplicate or avoid.

If you're the US, you can't. The US never learns from others' example: there's many examples of things other developed nations do far better than the US, but the US refuses to learn from their example. The US only makes big changes when it's their own idea, not because they saw it working well someplace else. Some examples: healthcare, the metric system, high-speed or even regular passenger rail, walkable cities, good zoning laws, etc.

Every rich country is currently undergoing a fertility crisis that will become an underpopulation crisis. South Korea's is particularly acute. There are various root causes and long-term fixes for this, but the only short-term fix is to open your country to immigration. This is part of why the US hasn't actually noticed its low fertility: we are a very desirable country to live in and we have legal paths to immigration that aren't predicated on signifiers of capital wealth. South Korea arguably has the desirability[0], but their immigration system is far more selective.

The kinds of optics South Korea can buy from virtue-signalling, but not actually implementing, progressive immigration policy are limited. You can't clickbait immigration law.

[0] Complicating South Korean immigration desirability are two competing factors:

- People from poorer countries tend to not be picky about what country will give them a visa, but,

- South Korea, like Japan[1] has racism and sexism problems that uniquely impacts immigrants from southeast Asia

[1] Korean and Japanese nationalists really hate it when you compare the two countries.

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