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Comment by noptd | Hacker News Reader

I think the argument against can be boiled down to this hypothetical analogy:

A few friends and I like your home better than ours. It's much nicer and safer than where we currently live, so we move into a few open bedrooms.

Now that we outnumber you and your family, we vote to change things in the common areas more to our liking. Some changes are small and happen over time, others more jarring and immediate. You like some of these changes in some cases, but sometimes quite the opposite.

Is it a foregone conclusion that this situation is for the greater good? If so, should your family be pressured or forced to accept?

Who has the power to make that determination?

After all, you were only there first so what gives you the right to prevent others from moving in?

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Personally, I can see the argument for both sides.

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I feel like the analogy isn't a service to the problem.

It's got all sorts of baggage and expectations pertaining to homeownership that don't carry over into migration. I feel it'd just be better to address the problem space directly and ask what specific problems you observe/predict with immigration.

The problem I'm inferring from your comment here would also seem to apply to families moving from Chicago to Boston. And what's funny is that people actually do complain about this (our mayor is from Chicago), but it's for nonsensical reasons in my experience.

>I feel it'd just be better to address the problem space directly

Fair enough. Not everyone enjoys naked cosmopolitanism. I don't live in New York City for a reason (I did at one point), and I don't live in the downtown of the city I live closest to (also did at one point, where I watched it change into something else). There are aspects of a nation that go beyond mere economic data, and longing for those things to remain stable and constant is a normal feeling and belief. When people talk about immigration as a mechanism to "solve" some problem, those other aspects get glossed over, usually pejoratively by calling everyone who doesn't agree with mass immigration a "racist" or a "bigot". Talking about Japan is an evocative example because it's so culturally distant from the west in ways that are obvious and stark. Thinking it wise that it changes to echo the mishmash that the west is becoming, in order to make some numbers in a spreadsheet go up, is in my estimation the more extreme position to stake out than simply observing that perhaps not all uniqueness was created equal. There's also the housing problem, where, for some reason, people pretend that this is the one instance in which the laws of supply and demand do not apply and large numbers of immigrants don't have an impact on the cost of housing.

>The problem I'm inferring from your comment here would also seem to apply to families moving from Chicago to Boston.

People complain about this because where you are from is a signal about having skin in the game. It's why politicians advertise their family ties to the place they are running to represent. I don't live in Boston, and am not that familiar with Mayor Wu. Maybe she'll run the city into the ground, maybe she won't. But if she does, she can always just go back to Chicago.

I'd also add here that it's really not even just about the greater good. There's something obviously unique and valuable about different places remaining different, rather than creating some sort of global homogeneity. Austin coined 'Keep Austin Weird' which Portland, and a handful of other such cities, then mimicked.

Of course it failed - the attractiveness of Austin, in part because of its distinct character, left it facing widespread 'migration' of a sort that the city was unaccustomed to dealing with, and it increasingly just looks like any other city. Identical to how if Japan starts opening the flood gates there will be all these people moving there because 'wow, Japan's so weird and unique' and soon enough e.g. Tokyo will look like any other city.

It could well be "better", by some metric or another, for Austin, Tokyo, and everywhere else to be basically the same, excepting some window dressing. But it sure creates a much more bland and less interesting world.

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