Comment by jc_811 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jc_811 | Hacker News Reader

When commenting about how this affects economic policy, immigration reform, military involvement, the causes of why we’re here, laws, title 42, migrants, justifications, and everything in between..

Remember that these are people just like you and I. They, like all humans, are seeking safety and stability for theirselves and families. The difference is that they were born, or ended up in, situations so dire they felt they had better odds trekking through the dangerous jungle(!) on foot for hundreds of miles (followed by thousands of more miles) rather than stay in their current situation.

It’s easy to get lost in the thousand foot view and giving opinions while sipping coffee & working on a laptop commenting on hacker news. Not to say any of our opinions aren’t valid - but rather just think about the people before jumping to any conclusions

Edit: This is not an argument for or against anything or any policy. Rather just a reminder that whichever side you are on, or whatever you are advocating for, just to remember we are talking about humans. That’s the only point I’m making.

I understand what you're saying, I was particularly moved by the story of the Vietnamese woman who lost her son crossing a river. It's heartbreaking.

For some of these people it's better odds. Particularly I'm sympathetic to people living in places like Venezuela or central Africa. But for the rest, people from places like Vietnam or China or Chile, their situations are most certainly not worth the risk. They were either sold propaganda that it was easy, or they are risking their family's lives irresponsibly for the prospect of financial gain on the idea that they can become sensationally rich in the US. I've personally known people from both of those sets, and I've been to some places in the world (and not as a military person or something like that) and seen things about as horrendous as are outlined in this article.

Losing your job during covid is not a solid motivator for a rational person to decide to do this. It takes intense desperation, delusion about the danger, or the idea that it will be incredibly worth the risk. Only people in the first circumstance can justify doing something like this when it's all said and done. The rest, they'll be traumatized in the best case scenario and then wind up in the same situation they were in back home, living in crime riddled ghettos paying too much in rent and working dead end shit jobs to barely scrape by. For many that's a worse existence than they left. There's a siren on the shores of the US, and it's song is "the land of opportunity." I've had people tell me that they literally believed the streets here were paved in gold until they arrived. The truth is, in most of the countries where these people come from, day to day life is pretty comparable, and your chances of hitting it big are about the same.

The only real benefit to those but the truly desperate is arbitraging the labor markets between countries using remittances. You can send money home to your family and they can move up and then when they're set you can return and have a higher class life. I don't believe it's moral to risk the lives of your small children for something like that.

Its a difficult challenge to try to define for someone else what their balance of risk and reward should be. I can say that it is hard for me to imagine deciding to risk this journey, but I wouldn't tell someone else they shouldn't.

The problem, as I see it, has nothing to do with whether people should make this journey or how much immigration is "enough" immigration. The underlying problem is the imbalance between entitlement programs and immigration. Entitlement programs create an incentive to be inside the country's borders that doesn't otherwise exist.

Both politicians and most media outlets have done a great job focusing discussion and debate on symptoms rather than root cause, that may have been intentional or unintentional. We can run in circles debating who and how many we want to allow to immigrate legally. That debate will never end when its based entirely on personal opinion.

A country with any entitlement programs has to control their borders at limit immigration. An interesting question is what to do when borders and immigration can't be controlled effectively. In that scenario, can the country continue to have entitlement programs without government debt spiralling out of control?

Yeah I'm 100% with you on the cause. I will tell someone they shouldn't if they have little kids with them. Risking your own life is fine, making changes for your family necessarily comes with risk, but carrying a small child through this jungle is downright irresponsible unless your child is going to starve or be harmed living in the place you left.

I say this from personal experience in medicine - many of them come here under highly auspicious circumstances e.g. "I claimed asylum because XYZ, and XYZ just so happened to be at the time I was 8.9 months pregnant, which circumstantially will just so happen to make my child a US citizen and thus qualify me for welfare, WIC, and free food, vis a vis my citizen-child, of which I definitely won't have 10 more of once I'm here"

The issue isn't asylum or american dream, both are fine. The issue is 10-20 million people milking the housing, welfare, and medical systems -really hard-. In the clinics, some days, 100% of patients were Spanish only speaking i.e. recently arrived here or not-so-recently arrived here and never bothered to learn english. Which is a cost to the public coffers. Not the baseline medical cost, a Spanish interpreter is legally required according to another medical related law, an additional cost.

That's to say, let's eradicate all financial governmental "free money" type motivations +/- "free citizenship to anchor babies" motivations as to why a person would come here. People wistfully point to Ellis Island as the spirit of America, in that spirit, let these immigrants make their way on their two feet with their two hands, without support, as those of Ellis Island, as those before, did.

The big pain of it is many of these people come from collapsed socialist countries, but maintain some degree of socialist ideals, so they try very hard to extract socialist benefits in the US. It's like guy, why did you think you country collapsed? Oh sorry, you don't speak English, el guy-o, el-why-o el country-o el collapso?

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