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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

> America's immigration system gets more and more rickety

It's completely insane that we allow mass migration of people with no money and no skills and make it incredibly difficult for the most valuable immigrants to get in.

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It's quite understandable, imho. Immigration is being allowed precisely for cheap labor, especially when citizens are not prepared to go through the extra hardship - for example, I remember reading that the fatalities when the bridge fell in Baltimore around 1 am, were all immigrants, all on duty at that hour.

For specialized labor, there is always a question of possible espionage and back-channel tech transfer. This is not so much perhaps for India as opposed to other technological rivals, but it may be one of the considerations in the immigration policy being counterintuitive.

> fatalities when the bridge fell in Baltimore

As an example of how strict immigration policy is, the crew were made to stay on the boat throughout, including while parts of the bridge were blown up.

I'd inferred that it was the company keeping them there, after hearing stories like this:

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-monday-ed...

This article goes into the actual reasons, the visas only came into play during the second month:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/18/us/baltimore-bridge-dali-ship...

Basically the company would get in trouble if the crew left, and they are too cheap to hire replacements, so they threaten them.

pfft people who want to find a way around what anyone "allows" will do so. To desperate people rules dont matter.

There are more than 50 countries right now standing with begging bowls outside the IMF cause their economies have no hope of growing without help. As long as that list has no hope of shrinking, people who live there and recognize that reality, are going to find ways to get out by hook or crook.

Immigration is a symptom of growing global inequality. Without inequality reducing no rules or walls are going to stop the incoming waves.

> we allow mass migration of people with no money and no skills

You don't? There's no visa for that category.

you do, if you have sanctuary cities and entire states openly claiming they will not arrest people who break immigration law, it reduces the ability of USA to actually pass policies to take in more skilled immigrants who'll be a net benefit to America as a whole.

Like the War On Drugs, the human cost, violence, and intrusiveness of enforcement is worse than the alleged problem. The much-vaunted localism of America lets states and cities decide that it's not a problem for them to allow people to live there, and they don't want to help the big bad Federal government disrupt that.

(it's still no picnic being in that category, unable to register for social security or even take an internal flight)

World isnt some amazing la la land, I hope people who break laws to immigrate to America, will continue having the same sympathies towards you, when they become majority, and start dominating over you with their culture.

It feels bad to say this, but to build a good well integrated state, integration is key, you cannot integrate people into a society, if you cannot even control the immigration rate. You can't just let people come to your country illegally, setup shop, and then tell everyone 'Cant do anything about it folks'.

The human cost is paid in everything, the cost americans need to worry about, is whether the safety and future prospects of americans is safeguarded, not of people who break laws to illegally immigrate.

It's like having sympathy for a next door neighbour child who is uncared for, and serving him/her food, while you're own child cries and starves to death.

America isnt a country, with limitless resources, and enough food,housing,healthcare to feed everybody, stop treating it like it.

Also, I'm not sure the people who arrive here illegally are as ready to integrate with America's culture, as some americans are ready to integrate with illegal migrants.

I understand life is cruel, and maybe america should even do good things for it, but not at the cost of watching americans starve to death, veterans getting overdosed on the streets wishing after years of suffering to just die and be at peace, and watching them not being able to help them, because our resources are too stretched, Charity starts at home. Even the people who migrate illegally here, they'll help their own first, before even sparing one thought towards you.

One needs to be realistic about certain things, it's perfectly doable to protect your own borders, Singapore does it against Malaysia, India does it against Pakistan and Bangladesh (big borders), China does it against neighbouring countries, most Asian countries can protect their own borders.

Why can't america?

> I hope people who break laws to immigrate to America, will continue having the same sympathies towards you, when they become majority, and start dominating over you with their culture.

I don't know how many folks around me broke the law to immigrate to America, but whether or not they broke the law to come here they faced a lot of racism, classism, and suspicion. I've been in the same area for about 20 years, and if I'm not a minority in my neighborhood it's close. It's the immigrants who are kind to me, help me keep my house secure, and trade goods and services with me. They even help me practice my awful Spanish with them. So in my case, yeah it's working out.

> America isnt a country, with limitless resources, and enough food,housing,healthcare to feed everybody, stop treating it like it.

America doesn't have limitless resources, but with 5% of the world's population it uses 25% of the world's resources [1]. To anybody's eyes that's going to look limitless.

I think simple laws of diffusion say that people are going to go where the resources are available. Whether it's politically tenable doesn't matter, this is human nature since we started walking.

[1] https://www.re-sources.org/2020/05/online-lesson-material-wo...

If you don't mind sharing, i'm curious to know where you live. I live in North central Oak Cliff which is a large, predominantly hispanic, area consisting of multiple neighborhood just SSW of downtown Dallas. In my neighborhood there's a local Mercado that i can walk to for small things, i speak enough Spanish to manage but I'm eyed with suspicion from when i go in to when i leave. My wife is a HS teacher with about 25% of her students being undocumented. They use a bus service in Oak Cliff to freely move back and forth to Mexico, i'm not sure how that works but that's what they use.

My son's middle school is a DISD public magnet in a wealthy area called Preston Hollow. The middle school is probably 85-90% hispanic and despite my kids being 1/2 Mexican they have faced enough racism and abuse that my wife and I have had multiple meetings with the administration to address it. African American kids face it even worse. One other anecdote, when my kids were in elementary some of their calsses were taught in Spanish because my kids and one other were the only ones who spoke English. The teachers, who barely spoke English themselves, got in trouble for that. Ironically, if you want true diversity in Dallas schools you have to pay/be admitted to the elite private schools.

All this to say, in my experience, neighborhoods consisting of mostly undocumented immigrants and cities welcoming of undocumented immigrants aren't that great... unless you're an undocumented immigrant.

Wow that's interesting. I'm in Longmont, Colorado. Boulder's annoying little brother with a chip on his shoulder. I was born here, and when I was growing up it was predominantly white. As more Latinos immigrated here white people in my mom's generation went through some rough transitions. Some of their racial bias rubbed off on me at the time.

Funny you should mention private school though because my mom did send me to a private high school. At its most diverse it was probably 90% white, and I wonder if that colors my experience. I did decide to learn Spanish there and ended up minoring in it in university.

One of my daughters goes to a predominately Latino high school, and my other daughter goes to a mostly white Jr. High. My oldest doesn't get any harassment like you describe, so my advice is to come to Longmont. Maybe because it's still a city in flux we humans haven't had a chance yet to revert to our normal xenophobic ways.

Haha but yeah when I go to the tortilleria to try my Spanish the people behind the counter almost always respond politely but pointedly in English. I feel like such a dork.

If 20 of the kids spoke Spanish and 2 of the kids spoke English, doesn't it make sense to teach the course in Spanish? Why would the teachers get in trouble?

For now at least half of the US is pretending there aren't 40-50 million illegal immigrants in the US, even though the country is overflowing with undocumented persons and it has become an enormous problem. Every mid-size town and above has a lot of illegal immigrants today, whereas 20 years ago there were few. So if you start switching public school systems over to Spanish because entire schools are now filled with illegal immigrants, or children of illegal immigrants, it's going to get a lot of unwanted attention. Plus it reveals that the US is fracturing rapidly. Whereas English is drastically more valuable than Spanish economically, the US is developing a large population base that does not speak English and it's quite bad for the country's cohesion and economic outcomes.

I'm seeing this firsthand. Where I live in a mid-size university town, 20-30 years ago there was practically zero illegal immigration, undocumented persons. It was fairly unheard of. Now there are a vast number of Spanish-only speaking illegal immigrants. My apartment complex in the span of a few years has become 3/4 illegal immigrants that only speak Spanish, almost entirely young adult males. They harrass anyone that isn't Hispanic and have tried to push all other tenants out of the complex. The police are called frequently for violence issues, and being uneducated young adult males they drink heavily and trash the place constantly.

It can't be fixed either. If you just remove the gigantic base of illegal immigrants GDP will plunge by at least 10%. Nobody will do that. There is no path forward other than chaos. No serious immigration reform will get passed near-term.

40-50 million really isn't credible.

Of course when the federal government decided to let millions of them in and the local government in Texas decided that it was a problem for them and decided to enforce it themselves, all those people who are so much in favor of local control when it comes to "sanctuary cities" suddenly lost their shit.

They are allowed in without visas

Not having a visa is the opposite of "allowed".

No. Being kicked out is the opposite of allowed.

> It's completely insane

It makes perfect sense when you understand the principal-agent problem and the current political landscape.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

If the policy was the opposite you could also argue that. Its basically a fundamental problem of government, whatever the outcome.

You have to be way more specific when you want to actually be insightful about the topic.

valuable immigrants are going to take my jerb and not flip my hamburger, pick the crops or mow my lawn.

I wouldn't defend america's immigration system (in my opinion the world should be borderless and you should be able to vote in any location where you can demonstrate that you've performed work for a wage or something like that), but if anyone should be allowed to seek labor by moving freely, it is the unskilled, who are already tremendously disadvantaged by globalization. Skilled labor is unlikely to be tremendously impoverished by being unable to move to the absolute optimal location.

In other words, one could say its insane that we draw imaginary lines on paper and then confine human beings to those lines based on the accident of their birth location.

Those lines are not imaginary per se. It means that the people living within those imaginary lines have come together with similar ideals and unity, arrived by many years of co-operation, to bestow certain rights and privileges to their fellow neighbors. Those rights were paid in blood, sweat and tears.

The reason people organized as tribes matters. Its part of our very nature. And those tribes also respected imaginary lines. Even animals respect some imaginary lines. Eventually, some may be accepted in the tribe. But no one would just walk in to the tribe. Its not how nature works.

Hardly. The lines are basically drawn by aristocrats of one kind or another and the rest of us have to deal with it. They are expressions of power and very little else, and mostly not the power of the people. The rights paid for in blood, sweat, and tears, as you say, were wrenched from the hands of the kinds of people who draw borders and consist entirely of statements that are borderless assertions of the value of human beings, not citizens. You may be right that there is some kind of fundamental tribal mentality in human beings, but that doesn't mean that enshrining that reality in law or even nurturing it is morally right. The idea that borders benefit the common person better than, for example, a system which genuinely respected the dignity and right of human beings regardless of their geographical coincidences, is bullshit.

>>> The lines are basically drawn by aristocrats of one kind or another and the rest of us have to deal with it I agree. So ? Tribes had the same interactions. Nothing's changed. We are still humans.

>>> The rights paid for in blood, sweat, and tears, as you say, were wrenched from the hands of the kinds of people

So by that assertion , wherever you live, you should vacate right now. Because if you take that line of thinking to its conclusion, it means that there are no property rights, and therefore, no security at all. And, there's the conundrum that the entire world disagrees with you, and has borders which they protect to varying degrees.

>>> (aristocrates) who draw borders and consist entirely of statements that are borderless assertions

The aristocrats are actually elected representatives. Its nice to paint them with the aristocrat brush, hey ill even join you there because i despise them too, but taking that tack doesn't change the fact that those are still elected representatives. And they made those assertions in our behalf. On behalf of free people.

>>> of the value of human beings, not citizens I don't know what that means. If you are arguing for inalienable rights, I agree there. But inalienable rights do not include the right to force a group of humans to carry the weight of a stranger. That's aggression over a human's inalienable rights.

>>> that doesn't mean that enshrining that reality in law or even nurturing it is morally right. It is morally right because you have the right to protect yourself and your kin. That's what borders are. Arguing otherwise goes against nature and against what's right. Once you leave your comfortable home to write on HN and instead house some malnourished somalians, maybe we will start paying attention to you.

All you advocate is charity, by usurping your tribe's rights. That is an act of aggression, and i'm calling you out on it. That's what politicians do. Maybe do something different from them, and lead by example ? (do as i say, not as i do, seems a fitting descripting here)

There are not property rights and there is no security except the security that human beings create for themselves and, ultimately, one another. "Property rights" do not descend from the platonic realm to protect you if someone invades your home. You may protect yourself or your neighbors may protect you or, as is more generally the case, I believe, a general sense of bonhomie shared by human beings everywhere, does most of the protecting. But the rights are a mere convention cooked up by people, for people, and even then they are more a symbolic act against the barbarism of the sorts of sociopaths who show up with soldiers and decide they are the kings.

It's true that now those kinds of people are often directed towards politics and become the elected officials which you assert justify the borders, but in fact most of the borders we live with were never drawn with any consent of the people living there. The vast majority of borders are pure objects of fiat power (especially the border over which the immigration you have a chip on your shoulder about, which was quite literally determined via war).

Herein I'm not advocating charity, which is, nevertheless, a fundamental human virtue. I am advocating that human beings, if they have any rights or dignity at all, have those rights and dignities by virtue of their humanity and not by virtue of where their parents happened to be when they were born. Communities of humans shouldn't tolerate freeloaders, but the people coming across the border are by and large the exact opposite: people willing to work harder for less than many people living here. If you are really so concerned with social parasites, let me suggest you look to institutions like health insurance companies, landlords, etc.

The biggest flaw on your argument is that you are choosing to ignore that we are talking is a complex system that involves time in a grand scale. Like most things in nature.

You can't understand the dynamics of a colony by observing 1 ant. Similarly, you can't understand borders by focusing on who or when they were drawn.

Borders are the equilibrium point of the strength and culture of a particular tribe over a very long period of time developed thru their communal effort. Borders will move or disappear when a tribe gets too strong or weak. Its a process that has always taken place in nature at all levels, for all time.

You can choose to look at the ant, and the ant may appeal feckless and it has a very short lifespan.

You are just stuck in the wrong domain. We are talking about natural processes. You seem to insist to suggest this is a different domain.

Your dream will evaporate when the newcomers self organize and disenfranchise you. This foolishness and lack of critical thinking will be ultimately resolved by nature itself.

What dream do you think I have?

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