Comment by gottorf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gottorf | Hacker News Reader

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> The majority of the people who came here from Europe in the 1700s and 1800s were laborers, factory workers, farmers, and other simple occupations. Why are we pulling up the ladder behind them?

The welfare state did not exist in that time, so the cost of absorbing immigration was confined to acculturation. Immigrants had to quickly start generating value or perish. The incentives are radically different now and the marginal cost to society of absorbing each additional immigrant is much higher.

US government spending as a percentage of GDP remained low single digits until WW1; it is roughly 35% today.

> You gotta stop trying to fight the current

You must also remember that the natural state of everything is decay, and the natural state of mankind in particular is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". The current grinds everything down to sand. It is incumbent upon everyone to fight the current in the way that affords the greatest benefit to society.

It takes energy to fight entropy.

I believe that the entropic state of human civilization is brutal authoritarianism.

Fight the current, indeed.

It's quite remarkable how effectively the citizens of the United States have managed to do that over the years. To resist the sweet, seductive lies of utopians who seek power.

I hope we're able to continue.

That’s insightful and terrifying at the same time

Hobbes doesn't get the last word on the natural state of mankind. Thank God.

What welfare costs are you referring to? Is there actual evidence that immigrants are a drain on the country? The information that I'm seeing suggests that they are a net positive in terms of taxes.

The response of cities to Texas bussing immigrants to them is pretty stark evidence: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/us/abbott-texas-migrant-b...

If they were a net gain, cities presumably wouldn't be playing hot potato with migrants by paying for one way bus tickets to "not here".

I lived in Texas for most of my life. Immigrants quite literally fueled the economy of Texas. Most homes in North Texas shift and require foundation leveling or repair every 8-10 years; estimates for this kind of work range from cheap to very expensive and it's done the same way. The difference is immigrants doing the work vs not. There's a certain amount of migratory ag that is supported by immigrants. Harbors are full of immigrant businesses and services being provided. The massive expansion in housing has mostly been facilitated by an immigrant labor force.

I lived under George W Bush, Rick Perry, and Greg Abbott as governors. I can tell you what distinguishes Greg Abbott from the rest of them is that Greg Abbott is an absolute piece of shit. I say that with zero embellishing. When I came home from the military there was this conspiracy theory called Jade Helm rocking Texas that a scheduled military training exercise in Texas was actually an exercise in taking peoples guns. Greg Abbott knew about and authorized the exercise, but stoked fears anyway: https://www.texastribune.org/2018/05/03/hysteria-over-jade-h...

Since then Greg has also employed barbed wire in the Rio Grand so that people crossing would get stuck in it and drown: https://www.axios.com/local/san-antonio/2023/07/22/doj-abbot...

Greg quite literally pried the Houston ISD's autonomy from them despite them completing the state mandate and progressing far better than anyone thought they would in the allotted time. Why? So he could institute a voucher system so that kids can go to private, Christian schools with state money: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/03/27/real-sto...

The man is a populist of the worst type. He takes an already bad situation, dumps fuel on it, calls it a solution, and acts none the wiser when things blow up; when they do inevitably blow up, he always has a patsy to blame. This is all to say, before I'd trust the actions of Greg Abbott and shipping people to new towns you should probably ask yourself, "What political game could Greg be playing?" and that will be closer to the truth than any rationalization you can come up with.

Sure, I agree that Greg Abbott is an asshole. That doesn't necessarily make him wrong, though? I'm not looking at his actions, it's obviously political theatre. The actions that appear to be revelatory to me are the ones by Democratic-led cities that went from grandstanding of their own to immediately backpedaling when the burden of providing social services to illegal immigrants was shared with them. Greg Abbott is taking a bad situation and sharing it with his neighbors, but they were closing their eyes and saying "there is no problem, and it's good actually" until they had to deal with it themselves.

Yes, they are griping because those cities already house most of Americas immigrants: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/20/key-findi...

Conservatives play funny games in their states to appease their racist and misinformed base. I wouldn’t think too deeply about it. California for example doesn’t do that song and dance and their economy is better than texas. 5th best in the world in fact if you considered california its own state separate from the rest of the US.

And this bussing showed that Ney Work and Chicago democrats were all talk and zero substance.

My observation was just the opposite. Unlike Texas, the Democratic cities did what they could to help the immigrants.

Sure, in the beginning but it also proved the Republican point that you can't handle an unrestricted amount of immigration, even in large cities which also goes in favour of immigration restrictions (and of course not total immigration blockage which is not feasible and silly).

Large cities don't have the sorts of agricultural jobs that illegal immigrants generally work. They also already have high cost of living and housing shortages. So it's not surprising that they have a limited ability to absorb illegal immigrants into their workforce.

Stepping back a moment. We also probably shouldn't be surprised that disorganized mass immigration is causing problems. That's why Democrats generally advocate comprehensive immigration reform. Its going to be easier to absorb immigration if its happening in an orderly manner.

The public sentiment in those cities regarding immigration has completely flipped from the moment the buses started arriving. They were loudly in favor of refusing to enforce immigration laws when El Paso, Texas was dealing with hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossings over decades, but the second a few thousand start showing up in buses in Chicago and New York City, they declare a state of emergency and start demanding the stop of the immigrants being transported to their cities because they have no room. And now it’s probably the single strongest issue the Republicans are going to win on in the election.

I’m not conservative, but sending illegal migrants directly to sanctuary cities might be the single most effective strategic political move in my lifetime. It flipped a decades old stalemate on its head practically overnight.

That's a fair point, but I also think that there is nuance.

The economy of most major cities isn't based on the agricultural industry that most illegal immigrants work in.

Cities generally already have high housing costs and density. So a sudden population surge is going to be more difficult to manage.

Basically Abbott bussed immigrants to the places that are least setup to be able to absorb them. So it's not surprising that there are problems. That doesn't necessarily reflect on whether immigrants are a net gain once they have been absorbed into the economy.

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