Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryptoegorophy | Hacker News Reader

What’s the conversation? Separating kids from parents or deporting them with parents because we don’t want them to be separate? There is no question about breaking the law by parents. Question is do you let children be with their mothers(who apparently asked to do so) or no.

As someone who came legally to Canada and went through thorough screening of 4 years before coming I just don’t get how people are ok with “cheaters” gaming the system.

“Think of the children” works when you are in a super white rich neighborhood, if you never lived in slums you won’t understand the abuse of the system by “think of the children”, you just don’t see it from the other side.

View on HN

> just don’t get how people are ok with “cheaters” gaming the system.

This is a story about citizens being deported without due process, without access to lawyers, without access to healthcare.

You don't have to be "ok with cheaters" to still want those people to have basic human rights and to see the system have legitimate judicial review.

The punishment here is far worse than the crime, and it's directed at children who didn't commit the crime, and it was doled out in a horrifyingly abusive totalitarian police-state style. Maybe you're not seeing things from the right side?

A dad of a kid was literally fighting for the kid to stay. He is an American. I read about one case and that was the situation.

Maybe stop making hypotheticals designed to excuse what happened and fake concerns. There was no attempt to keep family together oe do right by the kids.

> dad of a kid was literally fighting for the kid to stay. He is an American

Are you saying he's figuratively American, or that the father is a U.S. citizen. Because VML's petition for writ of habeas [1] doesn't mention the latter.

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69940863/1/v-m-l-v-harp...

In the case I have in mind, dad was an American, not to be deported anywhere cause he is an American and engaged in legal figt to keep the kid.

The "kid cant be without a parent" excuse does not work there.

Which case is this?

>I just don’t get how people are ok with “cheaters” gaming the system.

I usually steer clear of talking about these issues but there's something in the framing of this issue that maga has intentionally made people misunderstand: People do not say "I'm going to risk my life crossing a desert, and then when i have kids I'll be untouchable!" The actual "cheaters" are the birth hotel operators, whose clients are wealthy international elites who fly in while pregnant, then immediately leave to raise their US citizen babies abroad:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/feds-raid-l-maternity-h...

These instances of people actually and deliberately cheating the system require a completely separate system of enforcement that does not need to target desperate people who happened to get pregnant over the course of living life and making ends meet and whose children for all intents and purposes will grow up as regular English-speaking Americans who will go to school, work and pay taxes just like everyone else. Immigrants on dual-intent visas(e.g forever h1b but not yet green card), asylum seekers, etc do not get pregnant to "cheat the system".

But the birth hotels are people with money. Think the reich wing cares?

And life happens. The woman that became my wife was here on a temporary visa, life threw us together, our hearts had their own idea about the situation despite both of us mistakenly believing the other was not available. And, no, there's no way she engineered it--the choices that threw us together were all made by others.

Have you seriously not gone through the thought exercise of why some thoughtful + well-informed people would oppose your opinion on the subject?

(1) in previous centuries, the US accepted as many immigrants as could arrive “on Ellis Island” and it only took a few weeks. All of the immigration barriers that you overcame were added by American legislators many centuries after my ancestors came to America. I don’t view “illegal immigrants” any different than I viewed my own ancestors who came to America in the 1500s.

(2) US law affords legal pathways to residency/ citizenship for refugees and political asylum claimants. Just because you used one slow legal workflow doesn’t mean you should look down on people who used a faster legal workflow. They aren’t “gaming” the system — they are using the fast lane that was installed purposefully. If anything, we should use the legislature to revisit the fast lane (the refugee and political asylum claims)

(3) an infant didn’t have any volition in this situation. Maybe they were born here as an “anchor baby” (which the Trump Admin is trying to redefine as not-a-citizen, breaking with all of the jurisprudence). If they were pushed over the border by their parents or someone else, we have a duty to make sure their life is handled with care, not malice.

(4) there are political and media interests in making “legal immigrants” like you hate other immigrants. It makes native born Americans feel like they have cover for their hatred of immigrants. You should sit with the thought experiment of whether it’s actually relevant to the conversation that you “spent years getting here the hard way” or whether the conversation would be more productive without it.

(5) the reason the “immigration system is broken” is because there are multiple factions in America who can’t agree on what kind of changes to make to it. Famously Obama tried to force Congress to deal with it around 2013, but the “Gang of Eight” couldn’t come up with even broad guidelines for changes that both parties would agree to. There are simply too many people who have strong opinions and yet believe untrue things about American immigration. Are you perhaps in this category?

Re point (5), the "gang of eight" bill would've been the de facto process (illegally entering, having children or marrying, attempting to bring family over via chain migration) the de jure one via advertising to the rest of the word that violating US immigration law does not matter. We ended up running an experiment over the course of the last 4 years to see what that looks like and the results are grim.

>There are simply too many people who have strong opinions and yet believe untrue things about American immigration.

You appear to be operating from a different premise than people who are skeptical of past efforts to "reform" immigration law. "Permanent legal mass migration" is not the bargain the country wants to make, and thus far every attempt to "reform" immigration operates from that initial premise.

Our economy, ability to feed ourselves, and ability to sustain our population is fundamentally dependent on "Permanent legal mass migration."

Wages are too low to incentivize investment in automating these jobs, precisely because of illegal immigration.

What? China has dark factories now. Did their wages pass ours without anyone noticing?

Please show your homework because the underlying logic seems exactly opposite of the facts.

In some places Chinese labor is at price parity. However the reasons why China has dark factories is government investment and an abundance of mechatronics engineers.

People build factories in China because all the other factories are in China just down the road.

None of this contradicts my previous comment though. We don't invest in automation because we have cheap labor. China is an aging society with a shrinking workforce. Here we have cheap labor and offload the cost to the taxpayer. Illegal immigration is just another part of corporate welfare which is why socialists like Bernie sanders used to be against it.

Your counter argument clearly cuts against your initial argument. Low wages isn’t preventing automation. It’s lack of an ecosystem of similar suppliers, lack of highly trained talent and lack of government and market investment.

Liberals aren’t against immigration because it is corporate welfare but because of the strain it places on the social safety net and effects on jobs but both of those could be overcome with a rational policy on special economic zones.

Chinese dark factories aren’t harvesting bruisable fruits and veggies. Dark factories are specifically selected for tasks that are easily automated with extremely high precision. Most of agriculture isn’t.

The jobs that don't require a delicate hand are to a large degree already automated. But the robots are not up to the delicate stuff.

>But the robots are not up to the delicate stuff.

Robots did my dad's knee replacement surgery. I don't think this argument holds water anymore. Maybe if you make your claim more precise: delicate + scale. But, if that's the case, the scale problem is solved with money.

Robots? Or a human doctor that controlled it?

Lots of teleoperated stuff in the medical world. That's not the same as robots. There's still a skilled hand at the controls making the medical decisions.

This is a really bizarre claim to make. Are you claiming that the United States is, idk, forgetting how to farm and so we have to do mass immigration to bring in people who remember how? It also flies in the face of historical facts, like how the United States gained its status as an industrial powerhouse when immigration was at its lowest point in its history.

It’s not about knowledge. It’s about having people willing to use their strong backs.

Very few agricultural products are harvestable without the use of hands at the current prices. And when states have cracked down on illegal immigrants, farmers cry bloody murder that native-born Americans can’t last 1-2 days doing that work. American living standards are FAR higher than those of the people who are willing to work agricultural fields.

Okay. Then build robots to do it. Have you thought for a second about why these robots don't already exist? Perhaps it has something to do with available cheap labor. Really really strange to see a pro-immigration argument that amounts to "Big Ag needs their slave labor".

There wasn't even a single, popular vacuum robot with less then 7% one star ratings (complaints with valid utter failure). How naïve must one be to expect decent robots for farming. And those very soon? Do you believe in Santa? Or Tesla FSD?

A little difficult to parse your comment, but I think you're calling me naïve for asking the tech community on a message board for the incubator that has backed and does back the some of the most successful tech startups ever to think a little more deeply about how to solve these kinds of problems with technology. Wherein I posit that one of the reasons this tech community seemingly lacks interest - and surely the difficulty of the problem is also one of those reasons - is the availability of cheap labor, resulting in a weak argument for funding this kind of venture.

Interesting.

I'm not against automation. I'm against the interruption of the food supply chain. I don't won't the US to see a lot of pitchfork in use -- and that wouldn't be for farming.

I agree that (slave like) misuse of cheap labor is a problem.

We have a similar issue here. (Bad cleaning, by badly payed, overworked cleaners).

I'm a bit angry because I looked into fixing it by (partially) automating it, but the supply chains are rather bad. The currently available mainstream robots (Dreame, Roborock) are not up to the task (no proper support in Europe). The only interesting option seems to be cleanfix from Switzerland.

To make things short: that anger shouldn't have targeted you, because it boils down to my own current incompetence to fix a real problem. Sorry!

Define grim? Surging stock market, reduced inflation? 4% of the global population producing 75% of Nobel prizes ( half of which are immigrants), robust high tech manufacturing? Robust agriculture that was recovered from the first round of tariffs? Increased housing stock stabilizing prices? The Chips act and infrastructure bill that would have accelerated strategic manufacturing growth? Clean energy investments that would have given us more power for AI.

These are all things that sound great to a religious listener of Ezra Klein’s podcast but normal people either don’t know about them, don’t care about them, or disagree with them.

I don’t think we should make policy specifically to cater to the part of a voting constituency (the willingly ignorant) who doesn’t know about the factual benefits of a large incoming immigration policy.

Policy should be made to cater to factual objective reality, not to make people feel better.

Ezra Klein isn’t for the unwashed masses. He’s not even interesting to the average Democrat. His content is specifically for people who care about boring facts and policy. Obviously MMA and WWE fans and crude comedian fans will respond more to show of force, peacocking, and loud brash speeches. These things are vapid when it comes to politics. They only serve to elect Dark Triad figures, not good policy makers.

The problem with immigration is that we need it (just to maintain replacement rates and economic growth), but the average American voter says they don’t want it.

Also worth pointing out that it’s likely that Democrats didn’t move on securing the border earlier in Biden’s term because all of the people criticizing Biden’s immigration policy were crying wolf for years or decades before it actually became a huge problem.

Well, I agree with you (sort of), but democracy lacks a solution for this problem (ignorant people existing and voting). Unless you are going to give everyone an IQ test before they register to vote or some other means to test some "eligibility" dimension it doesn't seem solvable, since those options are non-starters in western democracies.

>The problem with immigration is that we need it (just to maintain replacement rates and economic growth), but the average American voter says they don’t want it.

What would be helpful here is if people who state this so plainly as a matter of fact actually took the time to interrogate why they think that way. I don't think this statement is true, quite the opposite. You are sort of hinting at the real problem in your parenthetical, not sure if you were intentional in that regard. One should probably determine why the birthrate in a particular nation is below replacement before concluding that the only solution is "infinity immigration". Moreover, economic growth is not the end-all-be-all of a country, since these are places with history and a people in them and not a "special economic zone" there the only reason anyone lives there is to conduct economic activity.

Representative democracy seeks to solve this by electing people that are trustworthy and knowledgeable. The problem is one of our parties is broken

Why is immigration a huge problem. Name one negative effect that actually impacts anyone or anything meaningful.

The mass asylum policy of Biden's term contributed in a significant way to this negative effect: Trump's re-election

> I don’t think we should make policy specifically to cater to the part of a voting constituency (the willingly ignorant)

The voters are free to vote for whoever they want for any reason. The burden is on the candidates to win them over.

Facts have a bias.

Don’t have a counter argument?

Counter argument to what? You posted a list of things that look like a copy/pasta from last year's campaign trail. Unrelated to my point, only true at the margins.

You’re approaching bad faith.

Was the stock market at historic highs. Yes

Was inflation falling and the lowest in the OECD. Yes

I am not going to go point by point. And they aren’t “true at the margins” when taken together as a whole. They are a manifestation of a broad policy that created improved conditions in the country that would have continued. And the CHIPS act was the exact policy to set us in the course for how the world will be over the next 30 years rather than what it was 60 years ago.

Eh, I think you're mostly arguing with a strawman, and want to make points that have nothing to do with what is being discussed.

I came to this country as an immigrant and gained my citizenship while going through the appropriate legal channels. I have zero fear of being rounded up in the current political climate.

The reason? I’m a white guy from Germany.

The entire process was easy for me. No one ever questions where I’m from because I’m white, have a white collar job, and speak fluent English. That seems enough to be enough for any fellow American to not consider me a “foreigner”.

If everything else about me was the same except I had darker skin and an accent I would be extremely scared right now that I could get rounded up based on nothing more than someone’s vibes of me.

Why was that woman being deported? I don’t think it was because of the color of her skin but she broke certain laws from what I’ve read. Don’t break laws and you would be fine. Problem before was that breaking laws went unpunished.

From the perspective from Sweden, the problem is not that complicated as long one agree to a few core concept. Children has rights that supersede that of their parents, and the parents are usually the best adults to take care of their children but not always.

If deportation of the whole family is the best for the child, then you do that. If placing the child with relatives or foster care is the better choice, you do that. Children aged 2, 4, and 7 can't "game" the system, and so its the adults job to take responsibility and find a solution that address the rights of the child.

> As someone who came legally to Canada and went through thorough screening of 4 years before coming I just don’t get how people are ok with “cheaters” gaming the system

We grew up with the idea that America was a beacon, not a whites-only gated community.

There’s no reason for us to think less of someone just because they want to be here. Our ancestors did exactly the same thing.

It sucks that you’re here complaining about the Statue of Liberty.

You think that letter was not signed under duress??

And I don't see the system particularly being gamed. The reality is an awful lot of people are fleeing oppression. The gangs and the cartels etc make it so the people don't have an option but to turn to them.

And despite what the reich wing says most of the immigrants are not a problem. And the reich wing specifically set out to ensure Biden couldn't accomplish anything. And now we see high profile and often wrong deportations, yet a lower total rate than under Biden.

Exactly. Children belong with their parents. And if their parents don't belong here, then Q.E.D.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com