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Comment by brickfaced | Hacker News Reader

The US didn't win World War 2, break the sound barrier, or put a man on the Moon only or primarily due to immigrant workers. We scoured the country's public school system for the sharpest young minds, sent them to institutions of higher learning with rigorous curricula, and found them positions in industry, government, or the military which made good use of their talent. Fetishizing the "nation of immigrants" narrative at the expensive of the native-born Americans who actually built most of this country's prosperity is, at best, ahistorical.

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We literally put a man on the moon because we acquired Werner Von Braun and used his plans... I mean, we probably would have eventually done it, but the timeline likely would have been different and the soviets might have beaten us to the moon, but the time line we are in, we had a space program as successful as it was because we acquired German scientists who were already thinking about these problems a even a decade or so before we started to invest into it.

That team was one of three that was developing rockets. The others were air force and navy.

1,200 men of the same ethnic and religious background of the median American, brought over in a one-time arrangement in the wake of the most destructive war ever fought, versus 100,000 Indian H1B visas granted annually. That's just India, not counting other countries or visa types. Okay. Sure. Totally the same. We couldn't have made it back to the Moon without a million indentured IT workers.

I really have no clue what you're trying to say. You presented as a bad historical example for your argument, landing on the moon. I showed how that was a flawed example and now you're talking about a people from India in IT and the Artemis program and an accomplishment of it that hasn't even happened yet. Looks like your trying to pick an argument of H1B visas with my comment that had no mention of it.

>Fetishizing the "nation of immigrants" narrative at the expensive of the native-born Americans who actually built most of this country's prosperity is, at best, ahistorical.

Except many of us can trace our family lines to immigration. On one side I have to go back to the early 1800's to see when they immigrated, but this is literally a country of immigrants. (other half of the family is late 1800s/early 1900s immigration)

Even today I would assume the average American doesn't have to trace back more than 100-150 years to see when part of their family moved here.

>We scoured the country's public school system for the sharpest young minds, sent them to institutions of higher learning with rigorous curricula, and found them positions in industry, government, or the military which made good use of their talent.

Don't even get us started on ahistorical nonsense when you just want to make things up. Not when talented folks[0] had to work through system that didn't want them so they could eventually make all the difference.

[0]https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/hidden-no-more-...

I hear you, I took umbrage with that comment as well. But I think it’s fair to consider whether we are doing enough for Americans just as we are welcoming newcomers to settle here at the same time? My experience as a native born Californian, raised by a single immigrant mother living in urban poverty is no, we do not. Granted I escaped poverty by self-funding my engineering education (Federal Loans and working full time) but it took the better part of my 20s to do so, at great personal cost and risk. In many ways that experience taught me just how unfairly stacked the odds are against the working poor, let alone their children.

I am really curious how welcoming do you think US is to new comers.. Most of the early immigrants in 1800s and early 1900s were blue collar workers (exactly like the people coming from the south of the border). Do you think there is any part of the system that is welcoming to them?

The brain-drain from the rest of the world to US started only after WW2 when US became the only industrialized country with a viable student -> employee -> citizen path and even that only works for a very small set of people.

I would love to hear about programs where the newcomers are treated better than you as a native citizen when both of you are equally qualified.

Our German scientists were better than their German scientists. We had no real science PhD programs until the 1920's. We had no scouting for young minds until the 1950's.

Our Jews from Odessa were better than theirs too.

> Fetishizing the "nation of immigrants" narrative at the expensive of the native-born Americans who actually built most of this country's prosperity is, at best, ahistorical.

Most of those native-born Americans were the children or grandchildren of immigrants.

What do you think a nation is? Is it a sports team or economic zone that hands out name tags to whoever steps off the boat with the right attitude? Or is it a specific group of people in a specific place with a shared language, lineage, culture, history, faith, and common destiny? I submit to you that it's the latter, and no empire nor state organized as the former can endure.

> Or is it a specific group of people in a specific place with a shared language, lineage, culture, history, faith, and common destiny?

I'm American, so I've never lived in this kind of nation.

> no empire nor state organized as the former can endure.

Looking at many of the longer-lived nations and empires of the past—having a shared language, lineage, culture, history, faith, common destiny? They had none of those. They were a conglomeration of people speaking different languages, from different lineages, with different cultures, different histories, and practicing different faiths.

>I'm American, so I've never lived in this kind of nation.

"What is water?", said the fish

Wait, you think America is that? Dude, you need to get out more, meet some new people.

I wouldn't say most native borns "built" the US. But sure, there are plenty of native born leaders who set the direction towards building such stuff.

> The US didn't win World War 2

The USSR would like a word.

The USSR never did pay us back for the massive, unprecedented, war-winning aid we delivered to them under Lend-Lease. Half a million trucks, thousands of tanks, tens of thousands of airplanes, millions of tons of food. And what did we get out of it? An implacable evil empire that sat like a boot on the neck of Eastern Europe for another 50 years after our "victory."

  A total of $50.1 billion (equivalent to $672 billion in 2023 when accounting for inflation) worth of supplies was shipped, or 17% of the total war expenditures of the U.S.

  In all, $31.4 billion went to the United Kingdom, $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union, $3.2 billion to France, $1.6 billion to China, and the remaining $2.6 billion to other Allies.

  Material delivered under the act was supplied at no cost, to be used until returned or destroyed.

  In practice, most equipment was destroyed, although some hardware (such as ships) was returned after the war.

  Supplies that arrived after the termination date were sold to the United Kingdom at a large discount for £1.075 billion, using long-term loans from the United States, which were finally repaid in 2006.

  Similarly, the Soviet Union repaid $722 million in 1971, with the remainder of the debt written off.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

This is all correct. It’s also hard to believe that any other country could have sustained the casualties the USSR took and it saved lives for the other allies by diverting troops to the Eastern Front. The US had nearly 500k deaths, the USSR (post war borders) had something like 26 million.

Both sides needed each other. From a US perspective, trading money for lives likely seemed worth it.

The USSR was an objectively terrible regime, and most the Russian governments that have followed on from it have been too. Underestimating the deaths Russian leadership is willing to tolerate has proven unwise a few too many times.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

Unless your ancestors crossed the Bering Strait ten thousand years ago, calling yourself "native born" doesn't mean a thing.

If you only came across ten thousand years ago, you are just a colonist that killed and displaced the people who came across sixteen thousand years ago. But that said, native born has a definition, and it is where you were born, not where your parents, grandparents or grand^14 parents was born.

my grand^10 parent's didn't exactly "immigrate" her per se. They were "invited". I guess they were "persuaded" to help fight the occasional war though.

It is kind of disingenuous and dishonest to say that there is no value or meaning on those Americans born in American soil, a nation should prioritize the people that live on it or well at least care for them and make them useful for nation building in the future.

Canada has proven that importing punjabis for almost two decades and ignoring the local people is not effective. So yeah there is a meaningful difference and saying native born in this context allows us to steer the conversation towards taking care towards those in the country already, which is something that neolib governments have not done in the last decades.

I say this as a person that was not born in the country he resides in now, but saying "calling yourself "native born" doesn't mean a thing " is a dishonest way to try to dissuade and delete necessary words that work towards more fruitful conversatons about how to improve th esytems in North America.

>Canada has proven that importing punjabis for almost two decades and ignoring the local people is not effective.

Curious, that's what Americans once said about the Irish and the Italians and the Germans and the French and the Poles and the Chinese and Jews and Catholics and Muslims and so on and on ad nauseum.

It's just a generational crab mentality born from xenophobia. Every new wave of immigrants decides they're "native" as soon as the next wave shows up. None of them are any more native than the others.

It seems like you have misread my comment and think I have a particular thing against any group of people.

That is simply not the intention of the comment, if you read correctly you will note that what I meant is that you need to take care of your own people, something that the United States ACCOMPLISHED from the fifties until before Reagan.

I am just not more native than an Indian or Italian person that just like me came a few decades ago. However to pretend there is no difference between me and someone whose family has been here for decades or centuries... that is dishonest.

Why do you call Xenophobia to prioritize giving good jobs to the local population ? It seems like your reading comprehension as well as your definition of Xenophobia is deeply, deeply flawed. We can have immigration that makes sense. Like what Canada used to have...

We should prioritize those that have been for decades in a country and those whose families have paid taxes for multiple generations, there is absolutely nothing xenophobic about that.

This type of solipsistic kumbaya slop is running face-first into reality, fast. People are different. Groups of people are different. Nations of people can be very different. They differ in meaningful and important and obvious ways. You'll live to see these differences continue to manifest in ways that will doubtless surprise you.

And the Ellis Islanders were at least mostly Christian, white, European. They shared a common cultural, historical, religious, and racial frame with native-born Americans. They could and did meaningfully assimilate. Despite this, that wave of migrants almost broke us. Anarchy, terrorism, riots, organized crime, et cetera. The Johnson-Reed Act was passed in response in 1924 and it slowed immigration to a crawl until the 1960s.

Today we have immigrants who speak utterly alien tongues, with no shared history or civilized tradition, arriving at breakneck pace, and who barely learn English because they can scrape by with apps and translation services, who stay in the cultural bubble of their country of origin, who don't see an American culture worth assimilating to. Especially among so-called high skill immigrants, they pick up a US passport and immediately see me as a worse or lesser "American" than they are. That's nuts. The melting pot, if one ever existed, has broken down. What's happening now is something quite different, and it's not good for me or my fellow Americans.

My ancestor was a Punjabi who immigrated in 1920. He managed not to blow up the country.

What’s magic about the Bering strait?

It's always a treat knowing every comment you get is going to either be triggered or purposely obtuse.

Usually considered the way that first humans got to the landmass, way back when.

You would never apply this reductive, solipsistic lens to any non-white ethnicity or culture and I think you know it

If you want to pick an era of technological progress to make that point maybe don't pick the one that involves America becoming a superpower by putting a bomb invented by Jewish refugees on a rocket build by ex Nazi scientists after a physics revolution where be basically got to go and take all of Germany's top talent lol

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